“Yes, yes—I see.” He took out another cigarette and occupied a moment in lighting it. “Well, kindness is kindness too—that’s all one can say.”
He had smoked again a while before she turned to him. “Have I wounded you by saying that?”
A certain effect of his flush was still in his smile. “It seems to me I should like you to wound me. I did what I wanted a moment ago,” he continued with some precipitation: “I brought you out handsomely on the subject of Mr. Longdon. That was my idea—just to draw you.”
“Well,” said Nanda, looking away again, “he has come into my life.”
“He couldn’t have come into a place where it gives me more pleasure to see him.”
“But he didn’t like, the other day when I used it to him, that expression,” the girl returned. “He called it ‘mannered modern slang’ and came back again to the extraordinary difference between my speech and my grandmother’s.”
“Of course,” the young man understandingly assented. “But I rather like your speech. Hasn’t he by this time, with you,” he pursued, “crossed the gulf? He has with me.”
“Ah with you there was no gulf. He liked you from the first.”
Vanderbank wondered. “You mean I managed him so well?”
“I don’t know how you managed him, but liking me has been for him a painful gradual process. I think he does now,” Nanda declared. “He accepts me at last as different—he’s trying with me on that basis. He has ended by understanding that when he talks to me of Granny I can’t even imagine her.”