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"Send her to Mr. Mitchett?" Mrs. Brookenham unresentfully quavered. Her colour, during her visitor's address had distinctly risen, but there was no irritation in her voice. "How do you know, Jane, that I don't want her downstairs?"

The Duchess looked at her with an audacity confirmed by the absence from her face of everything but the plaintive. "There you are, with your eternal English false positions! J'aime, moi, les situations nettes—je rien comprends pas d'autres. It wouldn't be to your honour—to that of your delicacy—that with your impossible house you SHOULD wish to plant your girl in your drawing-room. But such a way of keeping her out of it as throwing her into a worse—!"

"Well, Jane, you do say things to me!" Mrs. Brookenham blandly broke in. She had sunk back into her chair; her hands, in her lap pressed themselves together and her wan smile brought a tear into each of her eyes by the very effort to be brighter. It might have been guessed of her that she hated to seem to care, but that she had other dislikes too. "If one were to take up, you know, some of the things you say—!" And she positively sighed for the wealth of amusement at them of which her tears were the sign. Her friend could quite match her indifference. "Well, my child, TAKE them up; if you were to do that with them candidly, one by one, you would do really very much what I should like to bring you to. Do you see?" Mrs. Brookenham's failure to repudiate the vision appeared to suffice, and her visitor cheerfully took a further jump. "As much of Tishy as she wants—AFTER. But not before."