“I’m not sure!” Mrs. Brook earnestly exclaimed.
He had rung out and he kept it up with a limpidity unusual. “And product for product, when you come to that, I’m a queerer one myself than any other. The traditions _I_ smash!” Mitchy laughed.
Mrs. Brook had got up and Vanderbank had gone again to the window. “That’s exactly why,” she returned. “You’re a pair of monsters and your monstrosity fits. She does know too much,” she added.
“Well,” said Mitchy with resolution, “it’s all my fault.”
“Not ALL--unless,” Mrs. Brook returned, “that’s only a sweet way of saying that it’s mostly mine.”
“Oh yours too--immensely; in fact every one’s. Even Edward’s, I dare say; and certainly, unmistakably, Harold’s. Ah and Van’s own--rather!” Mitchy continued; “for all he turns his back and will have nothing to say to it.”
It was on the back Vanderbank turned that Mrs. Brook’s eyes now rested. “That’s precisely why he shouldn’t be afraid of her.”
He faced straight about. “Oh I don’t deny my part.”
He shone at them brightly enough, and Mrs. Brook, thoughtful, wistful, candid, took in for a moment the radiance. “And yet to think that after all it has been mere TALK!”
Something in her tone again made her hearers laugh out; so it was still with the air of good humour that Vanderbank answered: “Mere, mere, mere. But perhaps it’s exactly the ‘mere’ that has made us range so wide.”
Mrs. Brook’s intelligence abounded. “You mean that we haven’t had the excuse of passion?”
Her companions once more gave way to mirth, but “There you are!” Vanderbank said after an instant less sociably. With it too he held out his hand.
“You ARE afraid,” she answered as she gave him her own; on which, as he made no rejoinder, she held him before her. “Do you mean you REALLY don’t know if she gets it?”
“The money, if he DOESN’T go in?”--Mitchy broke almost with an air of responsibility into Vanderbank’s silence. “Ah but, as we said, surely--!”
It was Mitchy’s eyes that Vanderbank met. “Yes, I should suppose she gets it.”
“Perhaps then, as a compensation, she’ll even get MORE--!”
“If I don’t go in? Oh!” said Vanderbank. And he changed colour.
He was by this time off, but Mrs. Brook kept Mitchy a moment. “Now--by that suggestion--he has something to show. He won’t go in.”