"Well, only TELL me." Then as he said nothing: "I must be more like mamma ?" His expression confessed to his feeling an awkwardness.

"You're perhaps not quite enough like her." "Oh I know that if he deplores me as I am now she would have done so quite as much; in fact probably, as seeing it nearer, a good deal more.
She'd have despised me even more than he.

But if it's a question," Mrs.
Brook went on, "of not saying what mamma wouldn't, how can I know, don't you see, what she WOULD have said ?" Mrs.Brook became as wonderful as if she saw in her friend's face some admiring reflexion of the fine freedom of mind that--in such a connexion quite as much as in any other--she could always show.

"Of course I revere mamma just as much as he does, and there was everything in her to revere.

But she was none the less in every way a charming woman too, and I don't know, after all, do I?
what even she--in their peculiar relation--may not have said to him." Vanderbank's laugh came back.