THE AWKWARD AGE
little selfishness or other vulgarity—to get at the idea of things. The beautiful specimen Mrs. Brook had just given me of that," he continued to Mitchy, "was what made me break out to you about her when you came in." He spoke to one friend, but he looked at the other. "What's really 'superior' in her is that, though I suddenly show her an interference with a favorite plan, her personal resentment is nothing—all she wants is to see what may really happen, to take in the truth of the case and make the best of that. She offers me the truth, as she sees it, about myself, and with no nasty elation if it does chance to be the truth that suits her best. It was a charming, charming stroke."
Mitchy's appreciation was no bar to his amusement. "You're wonderfully right about us. But still it was a stroke."
If Mrs. Brook was less diverted she followed perhaps more closely. "If you do me so much justice then, why did you put to me such a cold, cruel question?—I mean when you so oddly challenged me on my handing on your news to Mitchy. If the principal beauty of our effort to live together is—and quite according to your own eloquence—in our sincerity, I simply obeyed the impulse to do the sincere thing. If we're not sincere, we're nothing."
"Nothing!"—it was Mitchy who first responded. "But we are sincere."
"Yes, we are sincere," Vanderbank presently said. "It's a great chance for us not to fall below ourselves; no doubt, therefore, we shall continue to soar and sing. We pay for it, people who don't like us say, in our self-consciousness—"
"But people who don't like us," Mitchy broke in, "don't matter. Besides, how can we be properly conscious of each other—?"
"That's it!"— Vanderbank completed his idea: "with-
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