Page:The Awkward Age (New York, Harper and Brothers, 1899).djvu/387

BOOK NINTH: VANDERBANK quiet." No spectator worth his salt could have seen them more than a little together without feeling how everything that, under his eyes or not, she either did or omitted rested on a profound acquaintance with his ways. They formed, Edward's ways, a chapter by themselves, of which Mrs. Brook was completely mistress, and in respect to which the only drawback was that a part of her credit was, by the nature of the case, predestined to remain obscure. So many of them were so queer that no one but she could know them, and know thereby into what crannies her reckoning had to penetrate. It was one of them, for instance, that if he was often most silent when most primed with matter, so when he had nothing to say he was always silent too—a peculiarity misleading, until mastered, for a lady who could have allowed in the latter case for almost any variety of remark. "What do you think," he said at last, "of his turning up to-day?"

"Of old Van's?"

"Oh, has he turned up?"

"Half an hour ago, and asking almost in his first breath for Nanda. I sent him up to her and he's with her now." If Edward had his ways she had also some of her own; one of which, in talk with him, if talk it could be called, was never to produce anything till the need was marked. She had thus a card or two always in reserve, for it was her theory that she never knew what might happen. It nevertheless did occur that he sometimes went, as she would have called it, one better.

"He's not with her now. I've just been with her."

"Then he didn't go up?" Mrs. Brook was immensely interested. "He left me, you know, to do so."

"Know?—how should I know? I left her five minutes ago."

"Then he went out without seeing her." Mrs. Brook 377