Vanderbank laughed straight out. “Do you mind my telling her that?”
“Oh she knows it. I’ve heard her say herself you were.”
“Ah I was,” he concurred. “You know we’ve spoken of that before.”
“I’m speaking now of all of you,” said Nanda. “But it was she who was most so, for she tried—I know she did, she told me so—to control you. And it was when, you were most controlled—!”
Van’s amusement took it up. “That we were most detrimental?”
“Yes, because of course what’s so awfully unutterable is just what we most notice. Tishy knows that,” Nanda wonderfully observed.
As the reflexion of her tone might have been caught by an observer in Vanderbank’s face it was in all probability caught by his interlocutress, who superficially, however, need have recognised there—what was all she showed—but the right manner of waiting for dinner. “The better way then is to dash right in? That’s what our friend here does?”
“Oh you know what she does!” the girl replied as with a sudden drop of interest in the question. She turned at the moment to the opening of the door.
It was Tishy who at last appeared, and her guest had his greeting ready. “We’re talking of the delicate matters as to which you think it’s better to dash right in; but I’m bound to say your inviting a hungry man to dinner doesn’t appear to be one of them.”
The sign of Tishy Grendon—as it had been often called in a society in which variety of reference had brought to high perfection, for usual safety, the sense of signs—was a retarded facial glimmer that, in respect to any subject, closed up the rear of the procession. It had been said of her indeed that when processions were at all rapid she was usually to be found, on a false impression of her whereabouts, mixed up with the next; so that now, for instance, by the time she had reached the point of saying to Vanderbank “Are you REALLY hungry?” Nanda had begun to appeal to him for some praise of their hostess’s appearance. This was of course with soft looks up and down at her clothes. “Isn’t she too nice? Did you ever see anything so lovely?”