Page:The Awkward Age (New York, Harper and Brothers, 1899).djvu/234

THE AWKWARD AGE help it. Accept it. Then of the other feeling—how she moves me—I won't speak."

"You sufficiently show it!"

Mr. Longdon continued to watch the bright circle on the table, lost in which a moment he let his friend's answer pass. "I won't begin to you on Nanda."

"Don't,' said Vanderbank. But in the pause that ensued each, in one way or another, might have been thinking of her for himself. It was broken by Mr. Longdon's presently going on: "Of course what it superficially has the air of is my offering to pay you for taking a certain step. It's open to you to be grand and proud—to wrap yourself in your majesty and ask if I suppose you bribeable. I haven't spoken without having thought of that."

"Yes," said Vanderbank sympathetically, "but it isn't as if you proposed to me, is it? anything dreadful. If one cares for a girl one's deucedly glad she has money. The more of anything good she has the better. I may assure you," he added with the brightness of his friendly intelligence and quite as if to show his companion the way to be least concerned—"I may assure you that, once I were disposed to act on your suggestion, I would make short work of any vulgar interpretation of my motive. I should simply try to be as magnificent as yourself." He smoked, he moved about; then he came up in another place. "I dare say you know that dear old Mitchy, under whose blessed roof we're plotting this midnight treason, would marry her like a shot and without a penny."

"I think I know everything—I think I've thought of everything. Mr. Mitchett," Mr. Longdon added, "is impossible."

Vanderbank appeared for an instant to wonder. "Wholly then through her attitude?"

"Altogether."

Again he hesitated. "You've asked her?" 224