Page:The Awkward Age (New York, Harper and Brothers, 1899).djvu/252

THE AWKWARD AGE understands he has asked her down for a regular long stay?"

Mrs. Brook barely hesitated. "She understands, I think, that what I expect of her is to make it as long as possible."

Vanderbank laughed out—as it was even after ten years still possible to laugh—at the childlike innocence with which her voice could invest the hardest teachings of life, then with something a trifle nervous in the whole sound and manner he sprang up from his chair. "What a blessing he is to us all!"

"Yes, but think what we must be to him."

"An immense interest, no doubt." He took a few aimless steps and, stooping over a basket of flowers, inhaled it with violence, almost buried his face. "I dare say we are interesting."

He had spoken rather vaguely, but Mrs. Brook knew exactly why. "We render him no end of a service. We keep him in touch with old memories."

Vanderbank had reached one of the windows, shaded, from without, by a great striped sun-blind, beneath which and between the flower-pots of the balcony he could see a stretch of hot, relaxed street. He looked a minute at these things. "I do so like your phrases!"

She had a pause that challenged his tone. "Do you call mamma a 'phrase'?"

He went off again, quite with extravagance, but quickly, leaving the window, pulled himself up. "I dare say we must put things for him—he does it, cares or is able to do it, so little himself."

"Precisely. He just quietly acts. That's his nature, dear thing. We must let him act."

Vanderbank seemed to stifle again too vivid a sense of her particular emphasis. "Yes, yes—we must let him."

"Though it won't prevent Nanda, I imagine," his hostess pursued, "from finding the fun of a whole month 242