Mrs. Brook faced serenely enough the directness of this challenge. “Well, what are you coming to? I spoke of the change in my life of course; I happen to be so constituted that my life has something to do with my mind and my mind something to do with my talk. Good talk: you know--no one, dear Van, should know better--what part for me that plays. Therefore when one has deliberately to make one’s talk bad--!”
“‘Bad’?” Vanderbank, in his amusement, fell back in his chair. “Dear Mrs. Brook, you’re too delightful!”
“You know what I mean--stupid, flat, fourth-rate. When one has to haul in sail to that degree--and for a perfectly outside reason--there’s nothing strange in one’s taking a friend sometimes into the confidence of one’s irritation.”
“Ah,” Vanderbank protested, “you do yourself injustice. Irritation hasn’t been for you the only consequence of the affair.”
Mrs. Brook gloomily thought. “No, no--I’ve had my calmness: the calmness of deep despair. I’ve seemed to see everything go.”
“Oh how can you say that,” her visitor demanded, “when just what we’ve most been agreed upon so often is the practical impossibility of making any change? Hasn’t it seemed as if we really can’t overcome conversational habits so thoroughly formed?”
Again Mrs. Brook reflected. “As if our way of looking at things were too serious to be trifled with? I don’t know--I think it’s only you who have denied our sacrifices, our compromises and concessions. I myself have constantly felt smothered in them. But there it is,” she impatiently went on. “What I don’t admit is that you’ve given me ground to take for a proof of your ‘intentions’--to use the odious term--your association with me on behalf of the preposterous fiction, as it after all is, of Nanda’s blankness of mind.”
Vanderbank’s head, in his chair, was thrown back; his eyes ranged over the top of the room. “There never has been any mystery about my thinking her--all in her own way--the nicest girl in London. She IS.”
His companion was silent a little. “She is, by all means. Well,” she then added, “so far as I may have been alive to the fact of any one’s thinking her so, it’s not out of place I should mention to you the difference made in my appreciation of it by our delightful little stay at Mertle. My views for Nanda,” said Mrs. Brook, “have somehow gone up.”