"In the event of his falsifying your prediction; which, by the way, has the danger, hasn't it ?--I mean for your intellectual credit--of making him, as we all used to be called by our nursemaids, 'contrairy.'" "Oh I've thought of that," Mrs.Brook returned.

"But he won't do, on the whole, even for the sweetness of spiting me, what he won't want to do.
_I_ haven't said I should lose him," she went on; "that's only the view he himself takes--or, to do him perfect justice, the idea he candidly imputes to me; though without, I imagine--for I don't go so far as that--attributing to me anything so unutterably bete as a feeling of jealousy." "You wouldn't dream of my supposing anything inept of you," Vanderbank said on this, "if you understood to the full how I keep on admiring you.
Only what stupefies me a little," he continued, "is the extraordinary critical freedom--or we may call it if we like the high intellectual detachment--with which we discuss a question touching you, dear Mrs.Brook, so nearly and engaging so your private and most sacred sentiments.

What are we playing with, after all, but the idea of Nanda's happiness ?" "Oh I'm not playing!" Mrs.Brook declared with a little rattle of emotion.
"She's not playing"-- Mr.Mitchett gravely confirmed it.

"Don't you feel in the very air the vibration of the passion that she's simply too charming to shake at the window as the housemaid shakes the tablecloth or the jingo the flag ?" Then he took up what Vanderbank had previously said.

"Of course, my dear man, I'm 'aware,' as you just now put it, of everything, and I'm not indiscreet, am I, Mrs.Brook?
in admitting for you as well as for myself that there WAS an impossibility you and I used sometimes to turn over together.