Vanderbank had reached one of the windows, shaded from without by a great striped sun-blind beneath which and between the flower-pots of the balcony he could see a stretch of hot relaxed street. He looked a minute at these things. “I do so like your phrases!”
She had a pause that challenged his tone. “Do you call mamma a ‘phrase’?”
He went off again, quite with extravagance, but quickly, leaving the window, pulled himself up. “I dare say we MUST put things for him—he does it, cares or is able to do it, so little himself.”
“Precisely. He just quietly acts. That’s his nature, dear thing. We must LET him act.”
Vanderbank seemed to stifle again too vivid a sense of her particular emphasis. “Yes, yes—we must let him.”
“Though it won’t prevent Nanda, I imagine,” his hostess pursued, “from finding the fun of a whole month at Beccles—or whatever she puts in—not exactly fast and furious.”
Vanderbank had the look of measuring what the girl might “put in.” “The place will be quiet, of course, but when a person’s so fond of a person—!”
“As she is of him, you mean?”
He hesitated. “Yes. Then it’s all right.”
“She IS fond of him, thank God!” said Mrs. Brook.