Page:The Awkward Age (New York, Harper and Brothers, 1899).djvu/187

BOOK FIFTH: THE DUCHESS He had smoked again awhile before she turned to him. "Have I wounded you by saying that?"

A certain effect of his flush was still in his smile. "It seems to me I should like you to wound me. I did what I wanted a moment ago," he continued with some precipitation: "I brought you out handsomely on the subject of Mr. Longdon. That was my idea—just to draw you."

"Well," said Nanda, looking away again, "he has come into my life."

"He couldn't have come into a place where it gives me more pleasure to see him."

"But he didn't like, the other day, when I used it to him, that expression," the girl returned. "He called it 'mannered modern slang,' and came back again to the extraordinary difference between my speech and my grandmother's."

"Of course," the young man understandingly assented. "But I rather like your speech. Hasn't he by this time, with you," he pursued, "crossed the gulf? He has with me."

"Ah, with you there was no gulf. He liked you from the first."

Vanderbank hesitated. "You mean I managed him so well?"

"I don't know how you managed him, but liking me has been for him a painful, gradual process. I think he does now," Nanda declared. "He accepts me at last as different—he's trying with me on that basis. He has ended by understanding that when he talks to me of Granny I can't even imagine her."

Vanderbank puffed away, "I can."

"That's what Mitchy says too. But you've both probably got her wrong."

"I don't know," said Vanderbank—"I've gone into it a good deal. But it's too late. We can't be Greeks if we would." 177