“Well, he goes himself on Saturday, and if I want I can go a few days later.”
“And what day can you go if I want?” Mrs. Brook spoke as with a small sharpness—just softened indeed in time—produced by the sight of a freedom in her daughter’s life that suddenly loomed larger than any freedom of her own. It was still a part of the unsteadiness of the vessel of her anxieties; but she never after all remained publicly long subject to the influence she often comprehensively designated to others as well as to herself as “nastiness.” “What I mean is that you might go the same day, mightn’t you?”
“With him—in the train? I should think so if you wish it.”
“But would HE wish it? I mean would he hate it?”
“I don’t think so at all, but I can easily ask him.”
Mrs. Brook’s head inclined to the chimney and her eyes to the window. “Easily?”
Nanda looked for a moment mystified by her mother’s insistence. “I can at any rate perfectly try it.”
“Remembering even that mamma would never have pushed so?”
Nanda’s face seemed to concede even that condition. “Well,” she at all events serenely replied, “I really think we’re good friends enough for anything.”
It might have been, for the light it quickly produced, exactly what her mother had been working to make her say. “What do you call that then, I should like to know, but his adopting you?”