Vanderbank laughed in spite of himself. “And does that make it any better?”
Mrs. Brook thought, but presently had a light—she almost smiled with it. “For US!” Then more woefully, “Don’t you want Carrie to be saved?” she asked.
“Why should I? Not a jot. Carrie be hanged!”
“But it’s for Fanny,” Mrs. Brook protested. “If Carrie IS rescued it’s a pretext the less for Fanny.” As the young man looked for an instant rather gloomily vague she softly quavered: “I suppose you don’t positively WANT Fanny to bolt?”
“To bolt?”
“Surely I’ve not to remind you at this time of day how Captain Dent-Douglas is always round the corner with the post-chaise, and how tight, on our side, we’re all clutching her.”
“But why not let her go?”
Mrs. Brook, at this, showed real resentment. “‘Go’? Then what would become of us?” She recalled his wandering fancy. “She’s the delight of our life.”
“Oh!” Vanderbank sceptically murmured.
“She’s the ornament of our circle,” his companion insisted. “She will, she won’t—she won’t, she will! It’s the excitement, every day, of plucking the daisy over.” Vanderbank’s attention, as she spoke, had attached itself across the room to Mr. Longdon; it gave her thus an image of the way his imagination had just seemed to her to stray, and she saw a reason in it moreover for her coming up in another place.