“Do you mean Nanda?”
“Talk me over with HER!” he smiled, “if you like. If you don’t believe Mrs. Donner is dust and ashes to me,” he continued, “you do little justice to your daughter.”
“Do you wish to break it to me that you’re in love with Nanda?”
He hesitated, but only as if to give weight to his reply. “Awfully. I can’t tell you how I like her.”
She wondered. “And pray how will THAT help me? Help me, I mean, to help you. Is it what I’m to tell your wife?”
He sat looking away, but he evidently had his idea, which he at last produced. “Why wouldn’t it be just the thing? It would exactly prove my purity.”
There might have been in her momentary silence a hint of acceptance of it as a practical contribution to their problem, and there were indeed several lights in which it could be considered. Mrs. Brook, on a quick survey, selected the ironic. “I see, I see. I might by the same law arrange somehow that Lady Fanny should find herself in love with Edward. That would ‘prove’ HER purity. And you could be quite at ease,” she laughed—“he wouldn’t make any presents!”
Mr. Cashmore regarded her with a candour that was almost a reproach to her mirth. “I like your daughter better than I like you.”
But it only amused her more. “Is that perhaps because I don’t prove your purity?”
What he might have replied remained in the air, for the door opened so exactly at the moment she spoke that he rose again with a start and the butler, coming in, received her enquiry full in the face. This functionary’s answer to it, however, had no more than the usual austerity. “Mr. Vanderbank and Mr. Longdon.”