Page:The Awkward Age (New York, Harper and Brothers, 1899).djvu/251

BOOK SIXTH: MRS. BROOK man could turn over. "Do you mean you'd let her go alone—?"

"To wherever she's asked?" said Mrs. Brook. "Why not? Don't talk like the Duchess."

Vanderbank seemed for a moment to try not to. "Couldn't Mr. Longdon take her? Why not?"

His friend looked really struck with it. "That would be working him. But to a beautiful end!" she meditated. "The only thing would be to get him also asked."

"Ah, but there you are, don't you see? Fancy 'getting' Mr. Longdon anything or anywhere whatever! Don't you feel," Vanderbank threw out, "how the impossibility of exerting that sort of patronage for him immediately places him?"

Mrs. Brook gave her companion one of those fitful glances of almost grateful appreciation with which their intercourse was even at its darkest hours frequently illumined. "As if he were the Primate or the French Ambassador? Yes, you're right—one couldn't do it; though it's very odd and one doesn't quite see why. It does place him. But he becomes thereby, exactly, the very sort of person with whom it would be most of an advantage for her to go about. What a pity," Mrs. Brook sighed, "he doesn't know more people!"

"Ah well, we are, in our way, bringing that to pass. Only we mustn't rush it. Leave it to Nanda herself," Vanderbank presently added; on which his companion so manifestly left it that she touched, after a moment's silence, on quite a different matter.

"I dare say he'd tell you—wouldn't he?—if he were to give her any considerable sum."

She had only obeyed his injunction, but he stared at the length of her jump. "He might attempt to do so, but I shouldn't at all like it." He was moved immediately to drop this branch of the subject and, apparently to help himself, take up another. "Do you mean she 241