Page:The Awkward Age (New York, Harper and Brothers, 1899).djvu/181

BOOK FIFTH: THE DUCHESS. The great thing was that he had walked from the station to stretch his legs, coming far round, for the lovely hour and the pleasure of it, by a way he had learnt on some previous occasion of being at Mertle.

"You've already staid here then?" Nanda, who had arrived but half an hour before, spoke as if she had lost the chance to give him a new impression.

"I've staid here—yes, but not with Mitchy; with some people or other—who the deuce can they have been?—who had the place for a few months a year or two ago."

"Don't you even remember?"

Vanderbank wondered and laughed. "It will come to me. But it's a charming sign of London relations, isn't it?—that one can come down to people this way, and be awfully well 'done for' and all that, and then go away and lose the whole thing, quite forget to whom one has been beholden. It's a queer life."

Nanda seemed for an instant to wish to say that one might deny the queerness, but she said something else instead. "I suppose a man like you doesn't quite feel that he is beholden: it's awfully good of him—it's doing a great deal for anybody—that he should come down at all; so that it would add immensely to his burden if anybody had to be remembered for it."

"I don't know what you mean by a man 'like me,'" Vanderbank returned. "I'm not any particular kind of a man." She had been looking at him, but she looked away, on this, and he continued good-humored and explanatory. "If you mean that I go about such a lot, how do you know it but by the fact that you're everywhere now yourself?—so that, whatever I am, in short, you're just as bad."

"You admit then that you are everywhere. I may be just as bad," the girl went on, "but the point is that I'm not nearly so good. Girls are such hacks—they can't be anything else." 171