Генри Джеймс
The Awkward Age
II
When after dinner the company was restored to the upper rooms the Duchess was on her feet as soon as the door opened for the entrance of the gentlemen. Then it might have been seen that she had a purpose, for as soon as the elements had again, with a due amount of the usual shuffling and mismatching, been mixed, her case proved the first to have been settled. She had got Mr. Longdon beside her on a sofa that was just right for two. “I’ve seized you without a scruple,” she frankly said, “for there are things I want to say to you as well as very particularly to ask. More than anything else of course I want again to thank you.”
No collapse of Mr. Longdon’s was ever incompatible with his sitting well forward. “‘Again’?”
“Do you look so blank,” she demanded, “because you’ve really forgotten the gratitude I expressed to you when you were so good as to bring Nanda up for Aggie’s marriage?—or because you don’t think it a matter I should trouble myself to return to? How can I help it,” she went on without waiting for his answer, “if I see your hand in everything that has happened since the so interesting talk I had with you last summer at Mertle? There have been times when I’ve really thought of writing to you; I’ve even had a bold bad idea of proposing myself to you for a Sunday. Then the crisis, my momentary alarm, has struck me as blowing over, and I’ve felt I could wait for some luck like this, which would sooner or later come.” Her companion, however, appeared to leave the luck so on her hands that she could only snatch up, to cover its nudity, the next handsomest assumption. “I see you cleverly guess that what I’ve been worried about is the effect on Mrs. Brook of the loss of her dear Mitchy. If you’ve not at all events had your own impression of this effect, isn’t that only because these last months you’ve seen so little of her? I’VE seen,” said the Duchess, “enough and to spare.” She waited as if for her vision, on this, to be flashed back at her, but the only result of her speech was that her friend looked hard at somebody else. It was just this symptom indeed that perhaps sufficed her, for in a minute she was again afloat. “Things have turned out so much as I desire them that I should really feel wicked not to have a humble heart. There’s a quarter indeed,” she added with a noble unction, “to which I don’t fear to say for myself that no day and no night pass without my showing it. However, you English, I know, don’t like one to speak of one’s religion. I’m just as simply thankful for mine—I mean with as little sense of indecency or agony about it—as I am for my health or my carriage. My point is at any rate that I say in no cruel spirit of triumph, yet do none the less very distinctly say, that the person Mr. Mitchett’s marriage has inevitably pleased least may be now rather to be feared.” These words had the sound of a climax, and she had brought them out as if, with her duty done, to leave them; but something that took place, for her eye, in the face Mr. Longdon had half-averted gave her after an instant what he might have called her second wind. “Oh I know you think she always HAS been! But you’ve exaggerated—as to that; and I don’t say that even at present it’s anything we shan’t get the better of. Only we must keep our heads. We must remember that from her own point of view she has her grievance, and we must at least look as if we trusted her. That, you know, is what you’ve never quite done.”
He gave out a murmur of discomfort which produced in him a change of position, and the sequel to the change was that he presently accepted from his cushioned angle of the sofa the definite support it could offer. If his eyes moreover had not met his companion’s they had been brought by the hand he repeatedly and somewhat distressfully passed over them closer to the question of which of the alien objects presented to his choice it would cost him least to profess to handle. What he had already paid, a spectator would easily have gathered from the long, the suppressed wriggle that had ended in his falling back, was some sacrifice of his habit of not privately depreciating those to whom he was publicly civil. It was plain, however, that when he presently spoke his thought had taken a stretch. “I’m sure I’ve fully intended to be everything that’s proper. But I don’t think Mr. Vanderbank cares for her.”
It kindled in the Duchess an immediate light. “Vous avez bien de l’esprit. You put one at one’s ease. I’ve been vaguely groping while you’re already there. It’s really only for Nanda he cares?”
“Yes—really.”
The Duchess debated. “And yet exactly how much?”
“I haven’t asked him.”
She had another, a briefer pause. “Don’t you think it about time you SHOULD?” Once more she waited, then seemed to feel her opportunity wouldn’t. “We’ve worked a bit together, but you don’t take me into your confidence. I dare say you don’t believe I’m quite straight. Don’t you really see how I MUST be?” She had a pleading note which made him at last more consentingly face her. “Don’t you see,” she went on with the advantage of it, “that, having got all I want for myself, I haven’t a motive in the world for spoiling the fun of another? I don’t want in the least, I assure you, to spoil even Mrs. Brook’s; for how will she get a bit less out of him—I mean than she does now—if what you desire SHOULD take place? Honestly, my dear man, that’s quite what I desire, and I only want, over and above, to help you. What I feel for Nanda, believe me, is pure pity. I won’t say I’m frantically grateful to her, because in the long run—one way or another—she’ll have found her account. It nevertheless worries me to see her; and all the more because of this very certitude, which you’ve so kindly just settled for me, that our young man hasn’t really with her mother—”
Whatever the certitude Mr. Longdon had kindly settled, it was in another interest that he at this moment broke in. “Is he YOUR young man too?”
She was not too much amused to cast about her.
“Aren’t such marked ornaments of life a little the property of all who admire and enjoy them?”
“You ‘enjoy’ him?” Mr. Longdon asked in the same straightforward way.
“Immensely.”
His silence for a little seemed the sign of a plan. “What is it he hasn’t done with Mrs. Brook?”
“Well, the thing that WOULD be the complication. He hasn’t gone beyond a certain point. You may ask how one knows such matters, but I’m afraid I’ve not quite a receipt for it. A woman knows, but she can’t tell. They haven’t done, as it’s called, anything wrong.”
Mr. Longdon frowned. “It would be extremely horrid if they had.”
“Ah but, for you and me who know life, it isn’t THAT that—if other things had made for it—would have prevented! As it happens, however, we’ve got off easily. She doesn’t speak to him—!”
She had forms he could only take up. “‘Speak’ to him—?”
“Why as much as she would have liked to be able to believe.”
“Then where’s the danger of which you appear to wish to warn me?”
“Just in her feeling in the case as most women would feel. You see she did what she could for her daughter. She did, I’m bound to say, as that sort of thing goes among you people, a good deal. She treasured up, she nursed along Mitchy, whom she would also, though of course not so much, have liked herself. Nanda could have kept him on with a word, becoming thereby so much the less accessible for YOUR plan. That would have thoroughly obliged her mother, but your little English girls, in these altered times—oh I know how you feel them!—don’t stand on such trifles; and—even if you think it odd of me—I can’t defend myself, though I’ve so directly profited, against a certain compassion also for Mrs. Brook’s upset. As a good-natured woman I feel in short for both of them. I deplore all round what’s after all a rather sad relation. Only, as I tell you, Nanda’s the one, I naturally say to myself, for me now most to think of; if I don’t assume too much, that is, that you don’t suffer by my freedom.”
Mr. Longdon put by with a mere drop of his eyes the question of his suffering: there was so clearly for him an issue more relevant. “What do you know of my ‘plan’?”
“Why, my dear man, haven’t I told you that ever since Mertle I’ve made out your hand? What on earth for other people can your action look like but an adoption?”
“Of—a—HIM?”
“You’re delightful. Of—a—HER! If it does come to the same thing for you, so much the better. That at any rate is what we’re all taking it for, and Mrs. Brook herself en tete. She sees—through your generosity—Nanda’s life more or less, at the worst, arranged for, and that’s just what gives her a good conscience.”
If Mr. Longdon breathed rather hard it seemed to show at least that he followed. “What does she want of a good conscience?”
From under her high tiara an instant she almost looked down at him. “Ah you do hate her!”
He coloured, but held his ground. “Don’t you tell me yourself she’s to be feared?”
“Yes, and watched. But—if possible—with amusement.”
“Amusement?” Mr. Longdon faintly gasped.
“Look at her now,” his friend went on with an indication that was indeed easy to embrace. Separated from them by the width of the room, Mrs. Brook was, though placed in profile, fully presented; the satisfaction with which she had lately sunk upon a light gilt chair marked itself as superficial and was moreover visibly not confirmed by the fact that Vanderbank’s high-perched head, arrested before her in a general survey of opportunity, kept her eyes too far above the level of talk. Their companions were dispersed, some in the other room, and for the occupants of the Duchess’s sofa they made, as a couple in communion, a picture, framed and detached, vaguely reduplicated in the high polish of the French floor. “She IS tremendously pretty.” The Duchess appeared to drop this as a plea for indulgence and to be impelled in fact by the interlocutor’s silence to carry it further. “I’ve never at all thought, you know, that Nanda touches her.”
Mr. Longdon demurred. “Do you mean for beauty?”
His friend, for his simplicity, discriminated. “Ah they’ve neither of them ‘beauty.’ That’s not a word to make free with. But the mother has grace.”
“And the daughter hasn’t
“Not a line. You answer me of course, when I say THAT, you answer me with your adored Lady Julia, and will want to know what then becomes of the lucky resemblance. I quite grant you that Lady Julia must have had the thing we speak of. But that dear sweet blessed thing is very much the same lost secret as the dear sweet blessed OTHER thing that went away with it—the decent leisure that, for the most part, we’ve also seen the last of. It’s the thing at any rate that poor Nanda and all her kind have most effectually got rid of. Oh if you’d trust me a little more you’d see that I’m quite at one with you on all the changes for the worse. I bear up, but I’m old enough to have known. All the same Mrs. Brook has something—say what you like—when she bends that little brown head. Dieu sait comme elle se coiffe, but what she gets out of it! Only look.”
Mr. Longdon conveyed in an indescribable manner that he had retired to a great distance; yet even from this position he must have launched a glance that arrived at a middle way. “They both know you’re watching them.”
“And don’t they know YOU are? Poor Mr. Van has a consciousness!”
“So should I if two terrible women—”
“Were admiring you both at once?” The Duchess folded the big feathered fan that had partly protected their vision. “Well, SHE, poor dear, can’t help it. She wants him herself.”
At the drop of the Duchess’s fan he restored his nippers. “And he doesn’t—not a bit—want HER!”
“There it is. She has put down her money, as it were, without a return. She has given Mitchy up and got nothing instead.”
There was delicacy, yet there was distinctness, in Mr. Longdon’s reserve. “Do you call ME nothing?”
The Duchess, at this, fairly swelled with her happy stare. “Then it IS an adoption?” She forbore to press, however; she only went on: “It isn’t a question, my dear man, of what I call it. YOU don’t make love to her.”
“Dear me,” said Mr. Longdon, “what would she have had?”
“That could be more charming, you mean, than your famous ‘loyalty’? Oh, caro mio, she wants it straighter! But I shock you,” his companion quickly added.
The manner in which he firmly rose was scarce a denial; yet he stood for a moment in place. “What after all can she do?”
“She can KEEP Mr. Van.”
Mr. Longdon wondered. “Where?”
“I mean till it’s too late. She can work on him.”
“But how?”
Covertly again the Duchess had followed the effect of her friend’s perceived movement on Mrs. Brook, who also got up. She gave a rap with her fan on his leg. “Sit down—you’ll see.”
III
He mechanically obeyed her although it happened to lend him the air of taking Mrs. Brook’s approach for a signal to resume his seat. She came over to them, Vanderbank followed, and it was without again moving, with a vague upward gape in fact from his place, that Mr. Longdon received as she stood before him a challenge of a sort to flash a point into what the Duchess had just said. “Why do you hate me so?”
Vanderbank, who, beside Mrs. Brook, looked at him with attention, might have suspected him of turning a trifle pale; though even Vanderbank, with reasons of his own for an observation of the sharpest, could scarce have read into the matter the particular dim vision that would have accounted for it—the flicker of fear of what Mrs. Brook, whether as daughter or as mother, was at last so strangely and differently to show herself.
“I should warn you, sir,” the young man threw off, “how little we consider that—in Buckingham Crescent certainly—a fair question. It isn’t playing the game—it’s hitting below the belt. We hate and we love—the latter especially; but to tell each other why is to break that little tacit rule of finding out for ourselves which is the delight of our lives and the source of our triumphs. You can say, you know, if you like, but you’re not obliged.”
Mr. Longdon transferred to him something of the same colder apprehension, looking at him manifestly harder than ever before and finding in his eyes also no doubt a consciousness more charged. He presently got up, but, without answering Vanderbank, fixed again Mrs. Brook, to whom he echoed without expression: “Hate you?”
The next moment, while he remained in presence with Vanderbank, Mrs. Brook was pointing out her meaning to him from the cushioned corner he had quitted. “Why, when you come back to town you come straight, as it were, here.”
“Ah what’s that,” the Duchess asked in his interest, “but to follow Nanda as closely as possible, or at any rate to keep well with her?”
Mrs. Brook, however, had no ear for this plea. “And when I, coming here too and thinking only of my chance to ‘meet’ you, do my very sweetest to catch your eye, you’re entirely given up—!”
“To trying of course,” the Duchess broke in afresh, “to keep well with ME!”
Mrs. Brook now had a smile for her. “Ah that takes precautions then that I shall perhaps fail of if I too much interrupt your conversation.”
“Isn’t she nice to me,” the Duchess asked of Mr. Longdon, “when I was in the very act of praising her to the skies?”
Their interlocutor’s reply was not too rapid to anticipate Mrs. Brook herself. “My dear Jane, that only proves his having reached some extravagance in the other sense that you had in mere decency to match. The truth is probably in the ‘mean’—isn’t that what they call it?—between you. Don’t YOU now take him away,” she went on to Vanderbank, who had glanced about for some better accommodation.
He immediately pushed forward the nearest chair, which happened to be by the Duchess’s side of the sofa. “Will you sit here, sir?”
“If you’ll stay to protect me.”
“That was really what I brought him over to you for,” Mrs. Brook said while Mr. Longdon took his place and Vanderbank looked out for another seat. “But I didn’t know,” she observed with her sweet free curiosity, “that he called you ‘sir.’” She often made discoveries that were fairly childlike. “He has done it twice.”
“Isn’t that only your inevitable English surprise,” the Duchess demanded, “at the civility quite the commonest in other societies?—so that one has to come here to find it regarded, in the way of ceremony, as the very end of the world!”
“Oh,” Mr. Longdon remarked, “it’s a word I rather like myself even to employ to others.”
“I always ask here,” the Duchess continued to him, “what word they’ve got instead. And do you know what they tell me?”
Mrs. Brook wondered, then again, before he was ready, charmingly suggested: “Our pretty manner?” Quickly too she appealed to Mr. Longdon. “Is THAT what you miss from me?”
He wondered, however, more than Mrs. Brook. “Your ‘pretty manner’?”
“Well, these grand old forms that the Duchess is such a mistress of.” Mrs. Brook had with this one of her eagerest visions. “Did mamma say ‘sir’ to you? Ought I? Do you really get it, in private, out of Nanda? SHE has such depths of discretion,” she explained to the Duchess and to Vanderbank, who had come back with his chair, “that it’s just the kind of racy anecdote she never in the world gives me.”
Mr. Longdon looked across at Van, placed now, after a moment’s talk with Tishy in sight of them all, by Mrs. Brook’s arm of the sofa. “You haven’t protected—you’ve only exposed me.”
“Oh there’s no joy without danger”—Mrs. Brook took it up with spirit. “Perhaps one should even say there’s no danger without joy.”
Vanderbank’s eyes had followed Mrs. Grendon after his brief passage with her, terminated by some need of her listless presence on the other side of the room. “What do you say then, on that theory, to the extraordinary gloom of our hostess? Her safety, by such a rule, must be deep.”
The Duchess was this time the first to know what they said. “The expression of Tishy’s face comes precisely from our comparing it so unfavourably with that of her poor sister Carrie, who, though she isn’t here to-night with the Cashmores—amazing enough even as coming WITHOUT that!—has so often shown us that an ame en peine, constantly tottering, but, as Nanda guarantees us, usually recovering, may look after all as beatific as a Dutch doll.”
Mrs. Brook’s eyes had, on Tishy’s passing away, taken the same course as Vanderbank’s, whom she had visibly not neglected moreover while the pair stood there. “I give you Carrie, as you know, and I throw Mr. Cashmore in; but I’m lost in admiration to-night, as I always have been, of the way Tishy makes her ugliness serve. I should call it, if the word weren’t so for ladies’-maids, the most ‘elegant’ thing I know.”
“My dear child,” the Duchess objected, “what you describe as making her ugliness serve is what I should describe as concealing none of her beauty. There’s nothing the matter surely with ‘elegant’ as applied to Tishy save that as commonly used it refers rather to a charm that’s artificial than to a state of pure nature. There should be for elegance a basis of clothing. Nanda rather stints her.”
Mrs. Brook, perhaps more than usually thoughtful, just discriminated. “There IS, I think, one little place. I’ll speak to her.”
“To Tishy?” Vanderbank asked.
“Oh THAT would do no good. To Nanda. All the same,” she continued, “it’s an awfully superficial thing of you not to see that her dreariness—on which moreover I’ve set you right before—is a mere facial accident and doesn’t correspond or, as they say, ‘rhyme’ to anything within her that might make it a little interesting. What I like it for is just that it’s so funny in itself. Her low spirits are nothing more than her features. Her gloom, as you call it, is merely her broken nose.”
“HAS she a broken nose?” Mr. Longdon demanded with an accent that for some reason touched in the others the spring of laughter.
“Has Nanda never mentioned it?” Mrs. Brook profited by this gaiety to ask.
“That’s the discretion you just spoke of,” said the Duchess. “Only I should have expected from the cause you refer to rather the comic effect.”
“Mrs. Grendon’s broken nose, sir,” Vanderbank explained to Mr. Longdon, “is only the kinder way taken by these ladies to speak of Mrs. Grendon’s broken heart. You must know all about that.”
“Oh yes—ALL.” Mr. Longdon spoke very simply, with the consequence this time, on the part of his companions, of a silence of some minutes, which he himself had at last to break. “Mr. Grendon doesn’t like her.” The addition of these words apparently made the difference—as if they constituted a fresh link with the irresistible comedy of things. That he was unexpectedly diverting was, however, no check to Mr. Longdon’s delivering his full thought. “Very horrid of two sisters to be both, in their marriages, so wretched.”
“Ah but Tishy, I maintain,” Mrs. Brook returned, “ISN’T wretched at all. If I were satisfied that she’s really so I’d never let Nanda come to her.”
“That’s the most extraordinary doctrine, love,” the Duchess interposed. “When you’re satisfied a woman’s ‘really’ poor you never give her a crust?”
“Do you call Nanda a crust, Duchess?” Vanderbank amusedly asked.
“She’s all at any rate, apparently, just now, that poor Tishy has to live on.”
“You’re severe then,” the young man said, “on our dinner of to-night.”
“Oh Jane,” Mrs. Brook declared, “is never severe: she’s only uncontrollably witty. It’s only Tishy moreover who gives out that her husband doesn’t like her. HE, poor man, doesn’t say anything of the sort.”
“Yes, but, after all, you know”—Vanderbank just put it to her—“where the deuce, all the while, IS he?”
“Heaven forbid,” the Duchess remarked, “that we should too rashly ascertain.”
“There it is—exactly,” Mr. Longdon subjoined.
He had once more his success of hilarity, though not indeed to the injury of the Duchess’s next word. “It’s Nanda, you know, who speaks, and loud enough, for Harry Grendon’s dislikes.”
“That’s easy for her,” Mrs. Brook declared, “when she herself isn’t one of them.”
“She isn’t surely one of anybody’s,” Mr. Longdon gravely observed.
Mrs. Brook gazed across at him. “You ARE too dear! But I’ve none the less a crow to pick with you.”
Mr. Longdon returned her look, but returned it somehow to Van. “You frighten me, you know, out of my wits.”
“I do?” said Vanderbank.
Mr. Longdon just hesitated. “Yes.”
“It must be the sacred terror,” Mrs. Brook suggested to Van, “that Mitchy so often speaks of. I’M not trying with you,” she went on to Mr. Longdon, “for anything of that kind, but only for the short half-hour in private that I think you won’t for the world grant me. Nothing will induce you to find yourself alone with me.”
“Why what on earth,” Vanderbank asked, “do you suspect him of supposing you want to do?”
“Oh it isn’t THAT,” Mrs. Brook sadly said.
“It isn’t what?” laughed the Duchess.
“That he fears I may want in any way to—what do you call it?—make up to him.” She spoke as if she only wished it had been. “He has a deeper thought.”
“Well then what in goodness is it?” the Duchess pressed.
Mr. Longdon had said nothing more, but Mrs. Brook preferred none the less to treat the question as between themselves. She WAS, as the others said, wonderful. “You can’t help thinking me”—she spoke to him straight—“rather tortuous.” The pause she thus momentarily produced was so intense as to give a sharpness that was almost vulgar to the little “Oh!” by which it was presently broken and the source of which neither of her three companions could afterwards in the least have named. Neither would have endeavoured to fix an infelicity of which each doubtless had been but too capable. “It’s only as a mother,” she added, “that I want my chance.”
But the Duchess was at this again in the breach. “Take it, for mercy’s sake then, my dear, over Harold, who’s an example to Nanda herself in the way that, behind the piano there, he’s keeping it up with Lady Fanny.”
If this had been a herring that, in the interest of peace, the Duchess had wished to draw across the scent, it could scarce have been more effective. Mrs. Brook, whose position had made just the difference that she lost the view of the other side of the piano, took a slight but immediate stretch. “IS Harold with Lady Fanny?”
“You ask it, my dear child,” said the Duchess, “as if it were too grand to be believed. It’s the note of eagerness,” she went on for Mr. Longdon’s benefit—“it’s almost the note of hope: one of those that ces messieurs, that we all in fact delight in and find so matchless. She desires for Harold the highest advantages.”
“Well then,” declared Vanderbank, who had achieved a glimpse, “he’s clearly having them. It brings home to one his success.”
“His success is true,” Mrs. Brook insisted. “How he does it I don’t know.”
“Oh DON’T you?” trumpeted the Duchess.
“He’s amazing,” Mrs. Brook pursued. “I watch—I hold my breath. But I’m bound to say also I rather admire. He somehow amuses them.”
“She’s as pleased as Punch,” said the Duchess.
“Those great calm women—they like slighter creatures.”
“The great calm whales,” the Duchess laughed, “swallow the little fishes.”
“Oh my dear,” Mrs. Brook returned, “Harold can be tasted, if you like—”
“If I like?” the Duchess parenthetically jeered. “Thank you, love!”
“But he can’t, I think, be eaten. It all works out,” Mrs. Brook expounded, “to the highest end. If Lady Fanny’s amused she’ll be quiet.”
“Bless me,” cried the Duchess, “of all the immoral speeches—! I put it to you, Longdon. Does she mean”—she appealed to their friend—“that if she commits murder she won’t commit anything else?”
“Oh it won’t be murder,” said Mrs. Brook. “I mean that if Harold, in one way and another, keeps her along, she won’t get off.”
“Off where?” Mr. Longdon risked.
Vanderbank immediately informed him. “To one of the smaller Italian towns. Don’t you know?”
“Oh yes. Like—who is it? I forget.”
“Anna Karenine? You know about Anna?”
“Nanda,” said the Duchess, “has told him. But I thought,” she went on to Mrs. Brook, “that Lady Fanny, by this time, MUST have gone.”
“Petherton then,” Mrs. Brook returned, “doesn’t keep you au courant?”
The Duchess blandly wondered. “I seem to remember he had positively said so. And that she had come back.”
“Because this looks so like a fresh start? No. WE know. You assume besides,” Mrs. Brook asked, “that Mr. Cashmore would have received her again?”
The Duchess fixed a little that gentleman and his actual companion. “What will you have? He mightn’t have noticed.”
“Oh you’re out of step, Duchess,” Vanderbank said. “We used all to march abreast, but we’re falling to pieces. It’s all, saving your presence, Mitchy’s marriage.”
“Ah,” Mrs. Brook concurred, “how thoroughly I feel that! Oh I knew. The spell’s broken; the harp has lost a string. We’re not the same thing. HE’S not the same thing.”
“Frankly, my dear,” the Duchess answered, “I don’t think that you personally are either.”
“Oh as for that—which is what matters least—we shall perhaps see.” With which Mrs. Brook turned again to Mr. Longdon. “I haven’t explained to you what I meant just now. We want Nanda.”
Mr. Longdon stared. “At home again?”
“In her little old nook. You must give her back.”
“Do you mean altogether?”
“Ah that will be for you in a manner to arrange. But you’ve had her practically these five months, and with no desire to be unreasonable we yet have our natural feelings.”
This interchange, to which circumstances somehow gave a high effect of suddenness and strangeness, was listened to by the others in a quick silence that was like the sense of a blast of cold air, though with the difference between the spectators that Vanderbank attached his eyes hard to Mrs. Brook and that the Duchess looked as straight at Mr. Longdon, to whom clearly she wished to convey that if he had wondered a short time before how Mrs. Brook would do it he must now be quite at his ease. He indulged in fact, after this lady’s last words, in a pause that might have signified some of the fulness of a new light. He only said very quietly: “I thought you liked it.”
At this his neighbour broke in. “The care you take of the child? They DO!” The Duchess, as she spoke, became aware of the nearer presence of Edward Brookenham, who within a minute had come in from the other room; and her decision of character leaped forth in her quick signal to him. “Edward will tell you.” He was already before their semicircle. “DO you, dear,” she appealed, “want Nanda back from Mr. Longdon?”
Edward plainly could be trusted to feel in his quiet way that the oracle must be a match for the priestess. “‘Want’ her, Jane? We wouldn’t TAKE her.” And as if knowing quite what he was about he looked at his wife only after he had spoken.
