“I’ve stayed here—yes, but not with Mitchy; with some people or other—who the deuce can they have been?—who had the place for a few months a year or two ago.”
“Don’t you even remember?”
Vanderbank wondered and laughed. “It will come to me. But it’s a charming sign of London relations, isn’t it?—that one CAN come down to people this way and be awfully well ‘done for’ and all that, and then go away and lose the whole thing, quite forget to whom one has been beholden. It’s a queer life.”
Nanda seemed for an instant to wish to say that one might deny the queerness, but she said something else instead. “I suppose a man like you doesn’t quite feel that he IS beholden. It’s awfully good of him—it’s doing a great deal for anybody—that he should come down at all; so that it would add immensely to his burden if anybody had to be remembered for it.”
“I don’t know what you mean by a man ‘like me,’” Vanderbank returned. “I’m not any particular kind of a man.” She had been looking at him, but she looked away on this, and he continued good-humoured and explanatory. “If you mean that I go about such a lot, how do you know it but by the fact that you’re everywhere now yourself?—so that, whatever I am, in short, you’re just as bad.”
“You admit then that you ARE everywhere. I may be just as bad,” the girl went on, “but the point is that I’m not nearly so good. Girls are such natural hacks—they can’t be anything else.”
“And pray what are fellows who are in the beastly grind of fearfully busy offices? There isn’t an old cabhorse in London that’s kept at it, I assure you, as I am. Besides,” the young man added, “if I’m out every night and off somewhere like this for Sunday, can’t you understand, my dear child, the fundamental reason of it?”
Nanda, with her eyes on him again, studied an instant this mystery. “Am I to infer with delight that it’s the sweet hope of meeting ME? It isn’t,” she continued in a moment, “as if there were any necessity for your saying that. What’s the use?” But all impatiently she stopped short.
He was eminently gay even if his companion was not. “Because we’re such jolly old friends that we really needn’t so much as speak at all? Yes, thank goodness—thank goodness.” He had been looking round him, taking in the scene; he had dropped his hat on the ground and, completely at his ease, though still more wishing to show it, had crossed his legs and closely folded his arms. “What a tremendously jolly place! If I can’t for the life of me recall who they were—the other people—I’ve the comfort of being sure their minds are an equal blank. Do they even remember the place they had? ‘We had some fellows down at—where was it, the big white house last November?—and there was one of them, out of the What-do-you-call-it?—YOU know—who might have been a decent enough chap if he hadn’t presumed so on his gifts.’” Vanderbank paused a minute, but his companion said nothing, and he pursued. “It does show, doesn’t it?—the fact that we do meet this way—the tremendous change that has taken place in your life in the last three months. I mean, if I’m everywhere as you said just now, your being just the same.”
“Yes—you see what you’ve done.”