Page:The Awkward Age (New York, Harper and Brothers, 1899).djvu/299

BOOK SEVENTH: MITCHY about himself. The most initiated observer of all would have been poor Mr. Longdon, who would now have been destined, however, to be also the most defeated, and the sign of whose tension would have been a smothered "Ah, if he doesn't do it now!" Well, Vanderbank didn't do it "now," and the long, odd, irrelevant sigh that he gave out might have sufficed as the record of his recovery from a peril lasting just long enough to be measured. Had there been any measure of it, meanwhile, for Nanda? There was nothing at least to show either the presence or the relief of anxiety in the way in which, by a prompt transition, she left her last appeal to him simply to take care of itself. "You haven't denied that Harold does borrow."

Vanderbank gave a note as of cheer for this luckily firmer ground. "My dear child, I never lent the silly boy five pounds in my life. In fact, I like the way you talk of that. I don't know quite for what you take me, but the number of persons to whom I have lent five pounds—"

"Is so awfully small"—she took him up on it—"as not to look so very well for you?" She held him an instant as with the fine intelligence of his meaning in this, and then, though not with sharpness, she broke out: "Why are you trying to make out that you're nasty and stingy? Why do you misrepresent—"

"My natural generosity? I don't misrepresent anything, but I take, I think, rather markedly good care of money." She had remained in her place and he was before her on the grass, his hands in his pockets and his manner perhaps a little awkward. "The way you young things talk of it!"

"Harold talks of it—but I don't think I do. I'm not a bit expensive—ask mother, or even ask father. I do with awfully little—for clothes and things, and I could easily do with still less. Harold's a born consumer, as 289