Page:The Awkward Age (New York, Harper and Brothers, 1899).djvu/14

THE AWKWARD AGE craned out his head and listened through the storm. Mr. Longdon wondered, to Vanderbank, if their course might by any chance be the same; which led our young friend immediately to express a readiness to see him safely in any direction that should accommodate him. As the footman's whistle spent itself in vain they got together into the four-wheeler, where, at the end of a few moments more, Vanderbank became conscious of having proposed his own rooms as a wind-up to their drive. Wouldn't that be a better finish of the evening than just separating in the wet? He liked his new acquaintance, who struck him as in a manner clinging to him, who was staying at an hotel presumably at that hour dismal, and who, confessing with easy humility to a connection positively timid with a club at which one couldn't have a visitor, accepted, under pressure, his invitation. Vanderbank, when they arrived, was amused at the air of added extravagance with which he said he would keep the cab: he so clearly enjoyed to that extent the sense of making a night of it.

"You young men, I believe, keep them for hours, eh? At least they did in my time," he laughed—"the wild ones! But I think of them as all wild then. I dare say that when one settles in town one learns how to manage; only I'm afraid, you know, that I've got completely out of it. I do feel really quite mouldy. It's a matter of thirty years—!"

"Since you've been in London?"

"For more than a few days at a time, upon my honor. You won't understand that—any more, I dare say, than I myself quite understand how, at the end of all, I've accepted this queer view of the doom of coming back. But I don't doubt I shall ask you, if you'll be so good as to let me, for the help of a hint or two: as to how to do, don't you know? and not to—what do you fellows call it?—be done. How about one of these things—!" 4