“Being where?”
“You do put one through!” Vanderbank laughed. But he showed himself perfectly prepared. “Out of the school-room and where she is now. In her mother’s drawing-room. At her mother’s fireside.”
Mr. Longdon stared. “But where else should she be?”
“At her husband’s, don’t you see?”
He looked as if he quite saw, yet was nevertheless not to be put off from his original challenge. “Ah certainly; but not as if she had been pushed down the chimney. All in good time.”
“What do you call good time?”
“Why time to make herself loved.”
Vanderbank wondered. “By the men who come to the house?”
Mr. Longdon slightly attenuated this way of putting it. “Yes—and in the home circle. Where’s the ‘strain’ of her being suffered to be a member of it?”
III