What was in her face indeed during this short passage might prove to have been, should we penetrate, the flicker of a sense that in spite of all intimacy and amiability they could, at bottom and as things commonly turned out, only be united against her.

Yet she made at the end a sort of choice in going on to Mitchy: "He hasn't at all told you the real reason of Nanda's idea that you should go in for Aggie." "Oh I draw the line there," said Vanderbank.

"Besides, he understands that too." Mitchy, on the spot, did himself and every one justice.

"Why it just disposes of me, doesn't it ?" It made Vanderbank, restless now and turning about the room, stop with a smile at Mrs.Brook.

"We understand too well!" "Not if he doesn't understand," she replied after a moment while she turned to Mitchy, "that his real 'combination' can in the nature of the case only be--!" "Oh yes"-- Mitchy took her straight up--"with the young thing who is, as you say, positively and helplessly modern and the pious fraud of whose classic identity with a sheet of white paper has been--ah tacitly of course, but none the less practically!--dropped.