Page:The Awkward Age (New York, Harper and Brothers, 1899).djvu/169

BOOK FOURTH: MR. CASHMORE it, I've done it!" she joyously cried to Vanderbank; "he likes me, or at least he can bear me—I've found him the way; and now I don't care even if he says I haven't." Then she turned again to her old friend. "We can manage about Nanda—you needn't ever see her. She's 'down' now, but she can go up again. We can arrange it at any rate—c'est la moindre des choses."

"Upon my honor I protest," Mr. Cashmore exclaimed, "against anything of the sort! I defy you to 'arrange' that young lady in any such manner without also arranging me. I'm one of her greatest admirers," he gaily announced to Mr. Longdon.

Vanderbank said nothing, and Mr. Longdon seemed to show that he would have preferred to do the same: the old man's eyes might have represented an appeal to him somehow to intervene, to show the due acquaintance, springing from practice and wanting in himself, with the art of conversation developed to the point at which it could thus sustain a lady in the upper air. Vanderbank's silence might, without his mere kind, amused look, have seemed almost inhuman. Poor Mr. Longdon had finally to do his own simple best. "Will you bring your daughter to see me?" he asked of Mrs. Brookenham.

"Oh, oh—that's an idea: will you bring her to see me?" Mr. Cashmore again broke out.

Mrs. Brook had only fixed Mr. Longdon with the air of unutterable things. "You angel, you angel!"—they found expression but in that.

"I don't need to ask you to bring her, do I?" Vanderbank now said to his hostess. "I hope you don't mind my bragging all over the place of the great honor she did me the other day in appearing quite by herself."

"Quite by herself? I say, Mrs. Brook!" Mr. Cashmore stupidly went on.

It was only now that she noticed him; which she did indeed but by answering Vanderbank. "She didn't go 159