Page:The Awkward Age (New York, Harper and Brothers, 1899).djvu/301

BOOK SEVENTH: MITCHY think that with him you're remarkable," Vanderbank observed—"putting on one side all you seem to know and on the other all he holds his tongue about. What then does he say?" the young man asked after a slight pause and perhaps even with a slight irritation.

Nanda glanced round again—she was folding, rather carefully, her paper. Presently her glance met their friend, who, having come out of one of the long windows that opened to the lawn, had stopped there to watch them. "He says just now that luncheon's ready."

 XXV

"I've made him," Nanda said, in the drawing-room, to Mitchy, "make Mr. Van go with him."

Mr. Longdon, in the rain, which had come on since the morning, had betaken himself to church, and his other guest, with sufficiently marked good-humor, had borne him company. The windows of the drawing-room looked at the wet garden, all vivid and rich in the summer shower, and Mitchy, after seeing Vanderbank turn up his trousers and fling back a last answer to the not quite sincere chaff his submission had engendered, adopted freely and familiarly the prospect not only of a grateful, freshened lawn, but of a good hour in the very pick, as he called it, of his actual happy conditions. The favoring rain, the dear old place, the charming, serious house, the large inimitable room, the absence of the others, the present vision of what his young friend had given him to count on—the sense of these delights was expressed in his fixed, generous glare. He was at first too pleased even to sit down; he measured the great space from end to end, admiring again everything he had admired before and protesting afresh that no modern ingenuity—not even his own, to which he did justice—could create effects of 291