Page:The Awkward Age (New York, Harper and Brothers, 1899).djvu/33

BOOK FIRST: LADY JULIA But he showed himself perfectly prepared. "Out of the school-room, where she is now. In her mother's drawing-room. At her mother's fireside."

Mr. Longdon stared. "But where else should she be?"

"At her husband's, don't you see?"

Mr. Longdon looked as if he quite saw, yet he was nevertheless, as regards his original challenge, not to be put off. "Ah, certainly," he replied with a slight stiffness, "but not as if she had been pushed down the chimney. All in good time."

Vanderbank turned the tables on him. "What do you call good time?"

"Why, time to make herself loved."

Vanderbank wondered. "By the men who come to the house?"

Mr. Longdon slightly attenuated this way of putting it. "Yes—and in the home circle. Where's the 'strain'—of her being suffered to be a member of it?"

 III

Vanderbank, at this, left his corner of the sofa and, with his hands in his pockets, and a manner so amused that it might have passed for excited, took several paces about the room while his interlocutor, watching him, waited for his response. The old man, as this response for a minute hung fire, took his turn at sitting down, and then Vanderbank stopped before him with a face in which something had been still more brightly kindled. "You ask me more things than I can tell you. You ask me more than I think you suspect. You must come and see me again—you must let me come and see you. You raise the most interesting questions, and we must sooner or later have them all out."  23