“And at last you’ve discovered?”
“Well—it has finally glimmered out a little in this extraordinary place.”
Vanderbank frankly wondered. “In consequence of anything particular that has happened?”
Mr. Longdon had a pause. “For an old idiot who notices as much as I something particular’s always happening. If you’re a man of imagination—”
“Oh,” Vanderbank broke in, “I know how much more in that case you’re one! It only makes me regret,” he continued, “that I’ve not attended more since yesterday to what you’ve been about.”
“I’ve been about nothing but what among you people I’m always about. I’ve been seeing, feeling, thinking. That makes no show, of course I’m aware, for any one but myself, and it’s wholly my own affair. Except indeed,” he added, “so far as I’ve taken into my head to make, on it all, this special appeal. There are things that have come home to me.”
“Oh I see, I see,” Vanderbank showed the friendliest alertness. “I’m to take it from you then, with all the avidity of my vanity, that I strike you as the person best able to understand what they are.”
Mr. Longdon appeared to wonder an instant if his intelligence now had not almost too much of a glitter: he kept the same position, his back against the table, and while Vanderbank, on the settee, pressed upright against the wall, they recognised in silence that they were trying each other. “You’re much the best of them. I’ve my ideas about you. You’ve great gifts.”
“Well then, we’re worthy of each other. When Greek meets Greek—!” and the young man laughed while, a little with the air of bracing himself, he folded his arms. “Here we are.”
His companion looked at him a moment longer, then, turning away, went slowly round the table. On the further side of it he stopped again and, after a minute, with a nervous movement, set a ball or two in motion. “It’s beautiful—but it’s terrible!” he finally murmured. He hadn’t his eyes on Vanderbank, who for a minute said nothing, and he presently went on: “To see it and not to want to try to help—well, I can’t do that.” Vanderbank, still neither speaking nor moving, remained as if he might interrupt something of high importance, and his friend, passing along the opposite edge of the table, continued to produce in the stillness, without the cue, the small click of the ivory. “How long—if you don’t mind my asking—have you known it?”