What's the use of being good ?" "Oh I didn't mean that," said Nanda.

"Besides, isn't Aggie of a goodness-- ?" "I wasn't talking of her.

I was asking myself what's the use of MY being." "Well, you can't help it any more than the Duchess can help--!" "Ah but she could if she would!" Mrs.Brook broke in with a sharper ring than she had yet given.

"We can't help being good perhaps, if that burden's laid on us--but there are lengths in other directions we're not absolutely obliged to go.

And what I think of when I stick in the pins," she went on, "is that Jane seems to me really never to have had to pay." She appeared for a minute to brood on this till she could no longer bear it; after which she jerked out: "Why she has never had to pay for ANYthing!" Nanda had by this time seated herself, taking her place, under the interest of their talk, on her mother's sofa, where, except for the removal of her long soft gloves, which one of her hands again and again drew caressingly through the other, she remained very much as if she were some friendly yet circumspect young visitor to whom Mrs.Brook had on some occasion dropped "DO come." But there was something perhaps more expressly conciliatory in the way she had kept everything on: as if, in particular serenity and to confirm kindly Mrs.Brook's sense of what had been done for her, she had neither taken off her great feathered hat nor laid down her parasol of pale green silk, the "match" of hat and ribbons and which had an expensive precious knob.