Page:The Awkward Age (New York, Harper and Brothers, 1899).djvu/372

THE AWKWARD AGE smiled at the error. She thrust the book straight at Mr. Longdon. "Is that Mr. Van's hand?"

Holding the disputed object, which he had put on his nippers to glance at, he presently, without speaking, looked over these aids straight at Nanda, who looked as straight back at him. "It was I who wrote Mr. Van's name." The girl's eyes were on Mr. Longdon, but her words as for the company. "I brought the book here from Buckingham Crescent and left it by accident in the other room."

"By accident, my dear," her mother replied, "I do quite hope. But what on earth did you bring it for? It's too hideous."

Nanda seemed to wonder. "Is it?" she murmured.

"Then you haven't read it?"

She just hesitated. "One hardly knows now, I think, what is and what isn't."

"She brought it only for me to read," Tishy gravely interposed.

Mrs. Brook looked strange. "Nanda recommended it?"

"Oh no—the contrary." Tishy, as if scared by so much publicity, floundered a little. "She only told me—"

"The awful subject?" Mrs. Brook wailed.

There was so deepening an echo of the drollery of this last passage that it was a minute before Vanderbank could be heard saying: "The responsibility's wholly mine for setting the beastly thing in motion. Still," he added, good-humoredly and as if to minimize, if not the cause, at least the consequence, "I think I agree with Nanda that it's no worse than anything else."

Mrs. Brook had recovered the volume from Mr. Longdon's relaxed hand and now, without another glance at it, held it behind her with an unusual air of firmness. "Oh, how can you say that, my dear man, of anything so revolting?" 362