Page:The Awkward Age (New York, Harper and Brothers, 1899).djvu/290

THE AWKWARD AGE Beatrice came out to Benedick: not to call him immediately, indeed, to the meal, but mentioning promptly that she had come at a bidding. Mr. Longdon had rebuked her, it appeared, for her want of attention to their guest, showing her in this way, to her pleasure, how far he had gone toward taking her, as he called it, into the house. "You've been thinking of yourself," Vanderbank asked, "as a mere clerk at a salary, and you now find that you're a partner and have a share in the concern?"

"It seems to be something like that. But doesn't a partner put in something? What have I put in?"

"Well—me, for one thing. Isn't it your being here that has brought me down?"

"Do you mean you wouldn't have come for him alone? Then don't you make anything of his attraction? You ought to," said Nanda, "when he likes you so."

Vanderbank, longing for a river, was in white flannels, and he took her question with a happy laugh, a handsome face of good-humor, that completed the effect of his long, cool fairness. "Do you mind my just sitting still, and letting me smoke, and staying with me awhile? Perhaps after a little we'll walkabout—sha'n't we? But face to face with this dear old house, in this jolly old nook, one is too contented to move, lest raising a finger even should break the spell. What will be perfect will be your just sitting down—do sit down—and scolding me a little. That, my dear Nanda, will deepen the peace." Some minutes later, while, near him but in another chair, she fingered the impossible book, as she pronounced it, that she had taken from him, he came back to what she had last said. "Has he talked to you much about his 'liking' me?"

Nanda waited a minute, turning over the book. "No."

"Then how are you just now so struck with it?"

"I'm not struck only with what I'm talked to about. I don't only know," she went on, "what people tell me." 280