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The Awkward Age
II
“But surely you’re not going already?” she asked. “Why in the world then do you suppose I appealed to you?”
“Bless me, no; I’ve lots of time.” He dropped, laughing for very eagerness, straight into another chair. “You’re too awfully interesting. Is it really an ‘appeal’?” Putting the question indeed he could scarce even yet allow her a chance to answer it. “It’s only that you make me a little nervous with your account of all the people who are going to tumble in. And there’s one thing more,” he quickly went on; “I just want to make the point in case we should be interrupted. The whole fun is in seeing you this way alone.”
“Is THAT the point?” Nanda, as he took breath, gravely asked.
“That’s a part of it—I feel it, I assure you, to be charming. But what I meant—if you’d only give me time, you know, to put in a word—is what for that matter I’ve already told you: that it almost spoils my pleasure for you to keep reminding me that a bit of luck like this—luck for ME: I see you coming!—is after all for you but a question of business. Hang business! Good—don’t stab me with that paper-knife. I listen. What IS the great affair?” Then as it looked for an instant as if the words she had prepared were just, in the supreme pinch of her need, falling apart, he once more tried his advantage. “Oh if there’s any difficulty about it let it go—we’ll take it for granted. There’s one thing at any rate—do let me say this—that I SHOULD like you to keep before me: I want before I go to make you light up for me the question of little Aggie. Oh there are other questions too as to which I regard you as a perfect fountain of curious knowledge! However, we’ll take them one by one—the next some other time. You always seem to me to hold the strings of such a lot of queer little dramas. Have something on the shelf for me when we meet again. THE thing just now is the outlook for Mitchy’s affair. One cares enough for old Mitch to fancy one may feel safer for a lead or two. In fact I want regularly to turn you on.”
“Ah but the thing I happen to have taken it into my head to say to you,” Nanda now securely enough replied, “hasn’t the least bit to do, I assure you, either with Aggie or with ‘old Mitch.’ If you don’t want to hear it—want some way of getting off—please believe THEY won’t help you a bit.” It was quite in fact that she felt herself at last to have found the right tone. Nothing less than a conviction of this could have made her after an instant add: “What in the world, Mr. Van, are you afraid of?”
Well, that it WAS the right tone a single little minute was sufficient to prove—a minute, I must yet haste to say, big enough in spite of its smallness to contain the longest look on any occasion exchanged between these friends. It was one of those looks—not so frequent, it must be admitted, as the muse of history, dealing at best in short cuts, is often by the conditions of her trade reduced to representing them—which after they have come and gone are felt not only to have changed relations but absolutely to have cleared the air. It certainly helped Vanderbank to find his answer. “I’m only afraid, I think, of your conscience.”
He had been indeed for the space more helped than she. “My conscience?”
“Think it over—quite at your leisure—and some day you’ll understand. There’s no hurry,” he continued—“no hurry. And when you do understand, it needn’t make your existence a burden to you to fancy you must tell me.” Oh he was so kind—kinder than ever now. “The thing is, you see, that I haven’t a conscience. I only want my fun.”
They had on this a second look, also decidedly comfortable, though discounted, as the phrase is, by the other, which had really in its way exhausted the possibilities of looks. “Oh I want MY fun too,” said Nanda, “and little as it may strike you in some ways as looking like it, just this, I beg you to believe, is the real thing. What’s at the bottom of it,” she went on, “is a talk I had not long ago with mother.”
“Oh yes,” Van returned with brightly blushing interest. “The fun,” he laughed, “that’s to be got out of ‘mother’!”
“Oh I’m not thinking so much of that. I’m thinking of any that she herself may be still in a position to pick up. Mine now, don’t you see? is in making out how I can manage for this. Of course it’s rather difficult,” the girl pursued, “for me to tell you exactly what I mean.”
“Oh but it isn’t a bit difficult for me to understand you!” Vanderbank spoke, in his geniality, as if this were in fact the veriest trifle. “You’ve got your mother on your mind. That’s very much what I mean by your conscience.”
Nanda had a fresh hesitation, but evidently unaccompanied at present by any pain. “Don’t you still LIKE mamma?” she at any rate quite successfully brought out. “I must tell you,” she quickly subjoined, “that though I’ve mentioned my talk with her as having finally led to my writing to you, it isn’t in the least that she then suggested my putting you the question. I put it,” she explained, “quite off my own bat.”
The explanation, as an effect immediately produced, did proportionately much for the visitor, who sat back in his chair with a pleased—a distinctly exhilarated—sense both of what he himself and what Nanda had done. “You’re an adorable family!”
“Well then if mother’s adorable why give her up? This I don’t mind admitting she did, the day I speak of, let me see that she feels you’ve done; but without suggesting either—not a scrap, please believe—that I should make you any sort of scene about it. Of course in the first place she knows perfectly that anything like a scene would be no use. You couldn’t make out even if you wanted,” Nanda went on, “that THIS is one. She won’t hear us—will she?—smashing the furniture. I didn’t think for a while that I could do anything at all, and I worried myself with that idea half to death. Then suddenly it came to me that I could do just what I’m doing now. You said a while ago that we must never be—you and I—anything but frank and natural. That’s what I said to myself also—why not? Here I am for you therefore as natural as a cold in your head. I just ask you—I even press you. It’s because, as she said, you’ve practically ceased coming. Of course I know everything changes. It’s the law—what is it?—‘the great law’ of something or other. All sorts of things happen—things come to an end. She has more or less—by his marriage—lost Mitchy. I don’t want her to lose everything. Do stick to her. What I really wanted to say to you—to bring it straight out—is that I don’t believe you thoroughly know how awfully she likes you. I hope my saying such a thing doesn’t affect you as ‘immodest.’ One never knows—but I don’t much care if it does. I suppose it WOULD be immodest if I were to say that I verily believe she’s in love with you. Not, for that matter, that father would mind—he wouldn’t mind, as he says, a tuppenny rap. So”—she extraordinarily kept it up—“you’re welcome to any good the information may have for you: though that, I dare say, does sound hideous. No matter—if I produce any effect on you. That’s the only thing I want. When I think of her downstairs there so often nowadays practically alone I feel as if I could scarcely bear it. She’s so fearfully young.”
This time at least her speech, while she went from point to point, completely hushed him, though after a full glimpse of the direction it was taking he ceased to meet her eyes and only sat staring hard at the pattern of the rug. Even when at last he spoke it was without looking up. “You’re indeed, as she herself used to say, the modern daughter! It takes that type to wish to make a career for her parents.”
“Oh,” said Nanda very simply, “it isn’t a ‘career’ exactly, is it—keeping hold of an old friend? but it may console a little, mayn’t it, for the absence of one? At all events I didn’t want not to have spoken before it’s too late. Of course I don’t know what’s the matter between you, or if anything’s really the matter at all. I don’t care at any rate WHAT is—it can’t be anything very bad. Make it up, make it up—forget it. I don’t pretend that’s a career for YOU any more than for her; but there it is. I know how I sound—most patronising and pushing; but nothing venture nothing have. You CAN’T know how much you are to her. You’re more to her, I verily believe, than any one EVER was. I hate to have the appearance of plotting anything about her behind her back; so I’ll just say it once for all. She said once, in speaking of it to a person who repeated it to me, that you had done more for her than any one, because it was you who had really brought her out. It WAS. You did. I saw it at the time myself. I was very small, but I COULD see it. You’ll say I must have been a most uncanny little wretch, and I dare say I was and am keeping now the pleasant promise. That doesn’t prevent one’s feeling that when a person has brought a person out—”
“A person should take the consequences,” Vanderbank broke in, “and see a person through?” He could meet her now perfectly and proceeded admirably to do it. “There’s an immense deal in that, I admit—I admit. I’m bound to say I don’t know quite what I did—one does those things, no doubt, with a fine unconsciousness: I should have thought indeed it was the other way round. But I assure you I accept all consequences and all responsibilities. If you don’t know what’s the matter between us I’m sure I don’t either. It can’t be much—we’ll look into it. I don’t mean you and I—YOU mustn’t be any more worried; but she and her so unwittingly faithless one. I HAVEN’T been as often, I know”—Van pleasantly kept his course. “But there’s a tide in the affairs of men—and of women too, and of girls and of every one. You know what I mean—you know it for yourself. The great thing is that—bless both your hearts!—one doesn’t, one simply CAN’T if one would, give your mother up. It’s absurd to talk about it. Nobody ever did such a thing in his life. There she is, like the moon or the Marble Arch. I don’t say, mind you,” he candidly explained, “that every one LIKES her equally: that’s another affair. But no one who ever HAS liked her can afford ever again for any long period to do without her. There are too many stupid people—there’s too much dull company. That, in London, is to be had by the ton; your mother’s intelligence, on the other hand, will always have its price. One can talk with her for a change. She’s fine, fine, fine. So, my dear child, be quiet. She’s a fixed star.”
“Oh I know she is,” Nanda said. “It’s YOU—”
“Who may be only the flashing meteor?” He sat and smiled at her. “I promise you then that your words have stayed me in my course. You’ve made me stand as still as Joshua made the sun.” With which he got straight up. “‘Young,’ you say she is?”—for as if to make up for it he all the more sociably continued. “It’s not like anything else. She’s youth. She’s MY youth—she WAS mine. And if you ever have a chance,” he wound up, “do put in for me that if she wants REALLY to know she’s booked for my old age. She’s clever enough, you know”—and Vanderbank, laughing, went over for his hat—“to understand what you tell her.”
Nanda took this in with due attention; she was also now on her feet. “And then she’s so lovely.”
“Awfully pretty!”
“I don’t say it, as they say, you know,” the girl continued, “BECAUSE she’s mother, but I often think when we’re out that wherever she is—!”
“There’s no one that all round really touches her?” Vanderbank took it up with zeal. “Oh so every one thinks, and in fact one’s appreciation of the charming things in that way so intensely her own can scarcely breathe on them all lightly enough. And then, hang it, she has perceptions—which are not things that run about the streets. She has surprises.” He almost broke down for vividness. “She has little ways.”
“Well, I’m glad you do like her,” Nanda gravely replied.
At this again he fairly faced her, his momentary silence making it still more direct. “I like, you know, about as well as I ever liked anything, this wonderful idea of yours of putting in a plea for her solitude and her youth. Don’t think I do it injustice if I say—which is saying much—that it’s quite as charming as it’s amusing. And now good-bye.”
He had put out his hand, but Nanda hesitated. “You won’t wait for tea?”
“My dear child, I can’t.” He seemed to feel, however, that something more must be said. “We shall meet again. But it’s getting on, isn’t it, toward the general scatter?”
“Yes, and I hope that this year,” she answered, “you’ll have a good holiday.”
“Oh we shall meet before that. I shall do what I can, but upon my word I feel, you know,” he laughed, “that such a tuning-up as YOU’VE given me will last me a long time. It’s like the high Alps.” Then with his hand out again he added: “Have you any plans yourself?”
So many, it might have seemed, that she had no time to take for thinking of them. “I dare say I shall be away a good deal.”
He candidly wondered. “With Mr. Longdon?”
“Yes—with him most.”
He had another pause. “Really for a long time?”
“A long long one, I hope.”
“Your mother’s willing again?”
“Oh perfectly. And you see that’s why.”
“Why?” She had said nothing more, and he failed to understand.
“Why you mustn’t too much leave her alone. DON’T!” Nanda brought out.
“I won’t. But,” he presently added, “there are one or two things.”
“Well, what are they?”
He produced in some seriousness the first. “Won’t she after all see the Mitchys?”
“Not so much either. That of course is now very different.”
Vanderbank demurred. “But not for YOU, I gather—is it? Don’t you expect to see them?”
“Oh yes—I hope they’ll come down.”
He moved away a little—not straight to the door. “To Beccles? Funny place for them, a little though, isn’t it?”
He had put the question as if for amusement, but Nanda took it literally. “Ah not when they’re invited so very very charmingly. Not when he wants them so.”
“Mr. Longdon? Then that keeps up?”
“‘That’?”—she was at a loss.
“I mean his intimacy—with Mitchy.”
“So far as it IS an intimacy.”
“But didn’t you, by the way”—and he looked again at his watch—“tell me they’re just about to turn up together?”
“Oh not so very particularly together.”
“Mitchy first alone?” Vanderbank asked.
She had a smile that was dim, that was slightly strange. “Unless you’ll stay for company.”
“Thanks—impossible. And then Mr. Longdon alone?”
“Unless Mitchy stays.”
He had another pause. “You haven’t after all told me about the ‘evolution’—or the evolutions—of his wife.”
“How can I if you don’t give me time?”
“I see—of course not.” He seemed to feel for an instant the return of his curiosity. “Yet it won’t do, will it? to have her out before HIM? No, I must go.” He came back to her and at present she gave him a hand. “But if you do see Mr. Longdon alone will you do me a service? I mean indeed not simply today, but with all other good chances?”
She waited. “Any service whatever. But which first?”
“Well,” he returned in a moment, “let us call it a bargain. I look after your mother—”
“And I—?” She had had to wait again.
“Look after my good name. I mean for common decency to HIM. He has been of a kindness to me that, when I think of my failure to return it, makes me blush from head to foot. I’ve odiously neglected him—by a complication of accidents. There are things I ought to have done that I haven’t. There’s one in particular—but it doesn’t matter. And I haven’t even explained about THAT. I’ve been a brute and I didn’t mean it and I couldn’t help it. But there it is. Say a good word for me. Make out somehow or other that I’m NOT a beast. In short,” the young man said, quite flushed once more with the intensity of his thought, “let us have it that you may quite trust ME if you’ll let me a little—just for my character as a gentleman—trust YOU.”
“Ah you may trust me,” Nanda replied with her handshake.
“Good-bye then!” he called from the door.
“Good-bye,” she said after he had closed it.
III
It was half-past five when Mitchy turned up; and her relapse had in the mean time known no arrest but the arrival of tea, which, however, she had left unnoticed. He expressed on entering the fear that he failed of exactitude, to which she replied by the assurance that he was on the contrary remarkably near it and by the mention of all the aid to patience she had drawn from the pleasure of half an hour with Mr. Van—an allusion that of course immediately provoked on Mitchy’s part the liveliest interest.
“He HAS risked it at last then? How tremendously exciting! And your mother?” he went on; after which, as she said nothing: “Did SHE see him, I mean, and is he perhaps with her now?”
“No; she won’t have come in—unless you asked.”
“I didn’t ask. I asked only for you.”
Nanda thought an instant. “But you’ll still sometimes come to see her, won’t you? I mean you won’t ever give her up?”
Mitchy at this laughed out. “My dear child, you’re an adorable family!”
She took it placidly enough. “That’s what Mr. Van said. He said I’m trying to make a career for her.”
“Did he?” Her visitor, though without prejudice to his amusement, appeared struck. “You must have got in with him rather deep.”
She again considered. “Well, I think I did rather. He was awfully beautiful and kind.”
“Oh,” Mitchy concurred, “trust him always for that!”
“He wrote me, on my note,” Nanda pursued, “a tremendously good answer.”
Mitchy was struck afresh. “Your note? What note?”
“To ask him to come. I wrote at the beginning of the week.”
“Oh—I see” Mitchy observed as if this were rather different. “He couldn’t then of course have done less than come.”
Yet his companion again thought. “I don’t know.”
“Oh come—I say: You do know,” Mitchy laughed. “I should like to see him—or you either!” There would have been for a continuous spectator of these episodes an odd resemblance between the manner and all the movements that had followed his entrance and those that had accompanied the installation of his predecessor. He laid his hat, as Vanderbank had done, in three places in succession and appeared to question scarcely less the safety, somewhere, of his umbrella and the grace of retaining in his hand his gloves. He postponed the final selection of a seat and he looked at the objects about him while he spoke of other matters. Quite in the same fashion indeed at last these objects impressed him. “How charming you’ve made your room and what a lot of nice things you’ve got!”
“That’s just what Mr. Van said too. He seemed immensely struck.”
But Mitchy hereupon once more had a drop to extravagance. “Can I do nothing then but repeat him? I came, you know, to be original.”
“It would be original for you,” Nanda promptly returned, “to be at all like him. But you won’t,” she went back, “not sometimes come for mother only? You’ll have plenty of chances.”
This he took up with more gravity. “What do you mean by chances? That you’re going away? That WILL add to the attraction!” he exclaimed as she kept silence.
“I shall have to wait,” she answered at last, “to tell you definitely what I’m to do. It’s all in the air—yet I think I shall know to-day. I’m to see Mr. Longdon.”
Mitchy wondered. “To-day?”
“He’s coming at half-past six.”
“And then you’ll know?”
“Well—HE will.”
“Mr. Longdon?”
“I meant Mr. Longdon,” she said after a moment.
Mitchy had his watch out. “Then shall I interfere?”
“There are quantities of time. You must have your tea. You see at any rate,” the girl continued, “what I mean by your chances.”
She had made him his tea, which he had taken. “You do squeeze us in!”
“Well, it’s an accident your coming together—except of course that you’re NOT together. I simply took the time that you each independently proposed. But it would have been all right even if you HAD met.
“That is, I mean,” she explained, “even if you and Mr. Longdon do. Mr. Van, I confess, I did want alone.”
Mitchy had been glaring at her over his tea. “You’re more and more remarkable!”
“Well then if I improve so give me your promise.”
Mitchy, as he partook of refreshment, kept up his thoughtful gaze. “I shall presently want some more, please. But do you mind my asking if Van knew—”
“That Mr. Longdon’s to come? Oh yes, I told him, and he left with me a message for him.”
“A message? How awfully interesting!”
Nanda thought. “It WILL be awfully—to Mr. Longdon.”
“Some more NOW, please,” said Mitchy while she took his cup. “And to Mr. Longdon only, eh? Is that a way of saying that it’s none of MY business?”
The fact of her attending—and with a happy show of particular care—to his immediate material want added somehow, as she replied, to her effect of sincerity. “Ah, Mr. Mitchy, the business of mine that has not by this time ever so naturally become a business of yours—well, I can’t think of any just now, and I wouldn’t, you know, if I could!”
“I can promise you then that there’s none of mine,” Mitchy declared, “that hasn’t made by the same token quite the same shift. Keep it well before you, please, that if ever a young woman had a grave lookout—!”
“What do you mean,” she interrupted, “by a grave lookout?”
“Well, the certainty of finding herself saddled for all time to come with the affairs of a gentleman whom she can never get rid of on the specious plea that he’s only her husband or her lover or her father or her son or her brother or her uncle or her cousin. There, as none of these characters, he just stands.”
“Yes,” Nanda kindly mused, “he’s simply her Mitchy.”
“Precisely. And a Mitchy, you see, is—what do you call it?—simply indissoluble. He’s moreover inordinately inquisitive. He goes to the length of wondering whether Van also learned that you were expecting ME.”
“Oh yes—I told him everything.”
Mitchy smiled. “Everything?”
“I told him—I told him,” she replied with impatience.
Mitchy hesitated. “And did he then leave me also a message?”
“No, nothing. What I’m to do for him with Mr. Longdon,” she immediately explained, “is to make practically a kind of apology.”
“Ah and for me”—Mitchy quickly took it up—“there can be no question of anything of that kind. I see. He has done me no wrong.”
Nanda, with her eyes now on the window, turned it over. “I don’t much think he would know even if he had.”
“I see, I see. And we wouldn’t tell him.”
She turned with some abruptness from the outer view. “We wouldn’t tell him. But he was beautiful all round,” she went on. “No one could have been nicer about having for so long, for instance, come so little to the house. As if he hadn’t only too many other things to do! He didn’t even make them out nearly the good reasons he might. But fancy, with his important duties—all the great affairs on his hands—our making vulgar little rows about being ‘neglected’! He actually made so little of what he might easily plead—speaking so, I mean, as if he were all in the wrong—that one had almost positively to SHOW him his excuses. As if”—she really kept it up—“he hasn’t plenty!”
“It’s only people like me,” Mitchy threw out, “who have none?”
“Yes—people like you. People of no use, of no occupation and no importance. Like you, you know,” she pursued, “there are so many.” Then it was with no transition of tone that she added: “If you’re bad, Mitchy, I won’t tell you anything.”
“And if I’m good what will you tell me? What I want really most to KNOW is why he should be, as you said just now, ‘apologetic’ to Mr. Longdon. What’s the wrong he allows he has done HIM?”
“Oh he has ‘neglected’ him—if that’s any comfort to us—quite as much.”
“Hasn’t looked him up and that sort of thing?”
“Yes—and he mentioned some other matter.”
Mitchy wondered. “‘Mentioned’ it?”
“In which,” said Nanda, “he hasn’t pleased him.”
Mitchy after an instant risked it. “But what other matter?”
“Oh he says that when I speak to him Mr. Longdon will know.”
Mitchy gravely took this in. “And shall you speak to him?”
“For Mr. Van?” How, she seemed to ask, could he doubt it? “Why the very first thing.”
“And then will Mr. Longdon tell you?”
“What Mr. Van means?” Nanda thought. “Well—I hope not.”
Mitchy followed it up. “You ‘hope’—?”
“Why if it’s anything that could possibly make any one like him any less. I mean I shan’t in that case in the least want to hear it.”
Mitchy looked as if he could understand that and yet could also imagine something of a conflict. “But if Mr. Longdon insists—?”
“On making me know? I shan’t let him insist. Would YOU?” she put to him.
“Oh I’m not in question!”
“Yes, you are!” she quite rang out.
“Ah—!” Mitchy laughed. After which he added: “Well then, I might overbear you.”
“No, you mightn’t,” she as positively declared again, “and you wouldn’t at any rate desire to.”
This he finally showed he could take from her—showed it in the silence in which for a minute their eyes met; then showed it perhaps even more in his deep exclamation: “You’re complete!”
For such a proposition as well she had the same detached sense. “I don’t think I am in anything but the wish to keep YOU so.”
“Well—keep me, keep me! It strikes me that I’m not at all now on a footing, you know, of keeping myself. I quite give you notice in fact,” Mitchy went on, “that I’m going to come to you henceforth for everything. But you’re too wonderful,” he wound up as she at first said nothing to this. “I don’t even frighten you.”
“Yes—fortunately for you.”
“Ah but I distinctly warn you that I mean to do my very best for it!”
Nanda viewed it all with as near an approach to gaiety as she often achieved. “Well, if you should ever succeed it would be a dark day for you.”
“You bristle with your own guns,” he pursued, “but the ingenuity of a lifetime shall be devoted to my taking you on some quarter on which you’re not prepared.”
“And what quarter, pray, will that be?”
“Ah I’m not such a fool as to begin by giving you a tip!” Mitchy on this turned off with an ambiguous but unmistakeably natural sigh; he looked at photographs, he took up a book or two as Vanderbank had done, and for a couple of minutes there was silence between them. “What does stretch before me,” he resumed after an interval during which clearly, in spite of his movements, he had looked at nothing—“what does stretch before me is the happy prospect of my feeling that I’ve found in you a friend with whom, so utterly and unreservedly, I can always go to the bottom of things. This luxury, you see now, of our freedom to look facts in the face is one of which, I promise you, I mean fully to avail myself.” He stopped before her again, and again she was silent. “It’s so awfully jolly, isn’t it? that there’s not at last a single thing that we can’t take our ease about. I mean that we can’t intelligibly name and comfortably tackle. We’ve worked through the long tunnel of artificial reserves and superstitious mysteries, and I at least shall have only to feel that in showing every confidence and dotting every ‘i’ I follow the example you so admirably set. You go down to the roots? Good. It’s all I ask!”
He had dropped into a chair as he talked, and so long as she remained in her own they were confronted; but she presently got up and, the next moment, while he kept his place, was busy restoring order to the objects both her visitors had disarranged. “If you weren’t delightful you’d be dreadful!”
“There we are! I could easily, in other words, frighten you if I would.”
She took no notice of the remark, only, after a few more scattered touches, producing an observation of her own. “He’s going, all the same, Mr. Van, to be charming to mother. We’ve settled that.”
“Ah then he CAN make time—?”
She judged it. “For as much as THAT, yes. For as much, I mean, as may sufficiently show her that he hasn’t given her up. So don’t you recognise how much more time YOU can make?”
“Ah—see precisely—there we are again!” Mitchy promptly ejaculated.
Yet he had gone, it seemed, further than she followed. “But where?”
“Why, as I say, at the roots and in the depths of things.”
“Oh!” She dropped to an indifference that was but part of her general patience for all his irony.
“It’s needless to go into the question of not giving your mother up. One simply DOESN’T give her up. One can’t. There she is.”
“That’s exactly what HE says. There she is.”
“Ah but I don’t want to say nothing but what ‘he’ says!” Mitchy laughed. “He can’t at all events have mentioned to you any such link as the one that in my case is now almost the most palpable. I’VE got a wife, you know.”
“Oh Mitchy!” the girl protestingly though vaguely murmured.
“And my wife—did you know it?” Mitchy went on, “is positively getting thick with your mother. Of course it isn’t new to you that she’s wonderful for wives. Now that our marriage is an accomplished fact she takes the greatest interest in it—or bids fair to if her attention can only be thoroughly secured—and more particularly in what I believe is generally called our peculiar situation: for it appears, you know, that we’re to the most conspicuous degree possible IN a peculiar situation. Aggie’s therefore already, and is likely to be still more, in what’s universally recognised as your mother’s regular line. Your mother will attract her, study her, finally ‘understand’ her. In fact she’ll ‘help’ her as she has ‘helped’ so many before and will ‘help’ so many still to come. With Aggie thus as a satellite and a frequenter—in a degree in which she never yet HAS been,” he continued, “what will the whole thing be but a practical multiplication of our points of contact? You may remind me of Mrs. Brook’s contention that if she did in her time keep something of a saloon the saloon is now, in consequence of events, but a collection of fortuitous atoms; but that, my dear Nanda, will become none the less, to your clearer sense, but a pious echo of her momentary modesty or—call it at the worst—her momentary despair. The generations will come and go, and the PERSONNEL, as the newspapers say, of the saloon will shift and change, but the institution itself, as resting on a deep human need, has a long course yet to run and a good work yet to do. WE shan’t last, but your mother will, and as Aggie is happily very young she’s therefore provided for, in the time to come, on a scale sufficiently considerable to leave us just now at peace. Meanwhile, as you’re almost as good for husbands as Mrs. Brook is for wives, why aren’t we, as a couple, we Mitchys, quite ideally arranged for, and why mayn’t I speak to you of my future as sufficiently guaranteed? The only appreciable shadow I make out comes, for me, from the question of what may to-day be between you and Mr. Longdon. Do I understand,” Mitchy asked, “that he’s presently to arrive for an answer to something he has put to you?” Nanda looked at him a while with a sort of solemnity of tenderness, and her voice, when she at last spoke, trembled with a feeling that clearly had grown in her as she listened to the string of whimsicalities, bitter and sweet, that he had just unrolled. “You’re wild,” she said simply—“you’re wild.”
