Vanderbank puffed away. “I can.”
“That’s what Mitchy says too. But you’ve both probably got her wrong.”
“I don’t know,” said Vanderbank—“I’ve gone into it a good deal. But it’s too late. We can’t be Greeks if we would.”
Even for this Nanda had no laugh, though she had a quick attention. “Do you call Granny a Greek?”
Her companion slowly rose. “Yes—to finish her off handsomely and have done with her.” He looked again at his watch. “Shall we go? I want to see if my man and my things have turned up.”
She kept her seat; there was something to revert to. “My fear of you isn’t superficial. I mean it isn’t immediate—not of you just as you stand,” she explained. “It’s of some dreadfully possible future you.”
“Well,” said the young man, smiling down at her, “don’t forget that if there’s to be such a monster there’ll also be a future you, proportionately developed, to deal with him.”
She had closed her parasol in the shade and her eyes attached themselves to the small hole she had dug in the ground with its point. “We shall both have moved, you mean?”
“It’s charming to feel we shall probably have moved together.”
“Ah if moving’s changing,” she returned, “there won’t be much for me in that. I shall never change—I shall be always just the same. The same old mannered modern slangy hack,” she continued quite gravely. “Mr. Longdon has made me feel that.”