Page:The Awkward Age (New York, Harper and Brothers, 1899).djvu/188

THE AWKWARD AGE Even for this Nanda had no laugh, though she had a quick attention. "Do you call Granny a Greek?"

Her companion slowly rose. "Yes—to finish her off handsomely and have done with her." He looked again at his watch. "Shall we go?—I want to see if my man and my things have turned up."

She kept her seat; there was something to revert to. "My fear of you isn't superficial. I mean it isn't immediate—not of you just as you stand," she explained. "It's of some dreadfully possible future you."

"Well," said the young man, smiling down at her, "don't forget that if there's to be such a monster, there'll also be a future you, proportionately developed, to deal with him."

Nanda, in the shade, had closed her parasol, and her eyes attached themselves to the small hole she had dug in the ground with its point. "We shall both have moved, you mean?"

"It's charming to think that we shall probably have moved together."

"Ah, if moving is changing," she returned, "there won't be much for me in that. I shall never change—I shall be always just the same. The same old-mannered, modern, slangy hack," she continued, quite gravely. "Mr. Longdon has made me feel that."

Vanderbank laughed aloud, and it was especially at her seriousness. "Well, upon my soul!"

"Yes," she pursued, "what I am I must remain. I haven't what's called a principle of growth." Making marks in the earth with her umbrella, she appeared to cipher it out. "I'm about as good as I can be—and about as bad. If Mr. Longdon can't make me different, nobody can."

Vanderbank could only speak in the tone of high amusement. "And he has given up the hope?" 178