Page:The Awkward Age (New York, Harper and Brothers, 1899).djvu/154

THE AWKWARD AGE "Yes. It was a dreadful horrid bore. But I talked only to your daughter."

She got up—the others were at hand, and she offered Mr. Cashmore a face that might have struck him as strange. "It's serious."

"Serious?"—he had no eyes for the others.

"She didn't tell me."

He gave a sound, controlled by discretion, which sufficed, none the less, to make Mr. Longdon—beholding him for the first time—receive it with a little of the stiffness of a person greeted with a guffaw. Mr. Cashmore visibly liked this silence of Nanda's about their meeting.

 XIV

Mrs. Brookenham, who had introduced him to the elder of her visitors, had also found, in serving these gentlemen with tea, a chance to edge at him with an intensity not to be resisted: "Talk to Mr. Longdon—take him off there." She had indicated the sofa at the opposite end of the room, and had set him an example by possessing herself, in the place she already occupied, of her "adored" Vanderbank. This arrangement, however, when she had made it, constituted for her, in her own corner, the ground of an instant appeal. "Will he hate me any worse for doing that?"

Vanderbank glanced at the others. "Will Cashmore, do you mean?"

"Dear no—I don't care whom he hates. But with Mr. Longdon I want to avoid mistakes."

"Then don't try quite so hard!" Vanderbank laughed. "Is that your reason for throwing him into Cashmore's arms?"

"Yes, precisely—so that I shall have these few moments to ask you for directions: you must know him, by 144