“Ah my brave old Van,” the youth returned, “don’t speak as if YOU had illusions. I know,” he pursued to the ladies, “just where some of Van’s must have perished, and some of the places I’ve in mind are just where he has left his tracks. A man must be wedded to sweet superstitions not nowadays to HAVE to open his eyes. Nanda love,” he benevolently concluded, “stay where you are. So at least I shan’t blush for you. That you’ve the good fortune to have reached your time of life with so little injury to your innocence makes you a case by yourself, of which we must recognise the claims. If Tishy can’t make you gasp, that’s nothing against you nor against HER—Tishy comes of one of the few innocent English families that are left. Yes, you may all cry ‘Oho!’—but I defy you to name me say five, or at most seven, in which some awful thing or other hasn’t happened. Of course ours is one, and Tishy’s is one, and Van’s is one, and Mr. Longdon’s is one, and that makes you, bang off, four. So there you are!” Harold gaily wound up.
“I see now why he’s the rage!” Vanderbank observed to Nanda.
But Mrs. Grendon expressed to their young friend a lingering wonder. “Do you mean you go in for the adoption—?”
“Oh Tishy!” Nanda mildly murmured.
Harold, however, had his own tact. “The dear man’s taking her quite over? Not altogether unreservedly. I’m with the governor: I think we ought to GET something. ‘Oh yes, dear man, but what do you GIVE us for her?’—that’s what I should say to him. I mean, don’t you know, that I don’t think she’s making quite the bargain she might. If he were to want ME I don’t say he mightn’t have me, but I should have it on my conscience to make it in one way or another a good thing for my parents. You ARE nice, old woman”—he turned to his sister—“and one can still feel for the flower of your youth something of the wonderful ‘reverence’ that we were all brought up on. For God’s sake therefore—all the more—don’t really close with him till you’ve had another word or two with me. I’ll be hanged”—he appealed to the company again—“if he shall have her for nothing!”
“See rather,” Vanderbank said to Mrs. Grendon, “how little it’s like your really losing her that she should be able this evening fairly to bring the dear man to you. At this rate we don’t lose her—we simply get him as well.”
“Ah but is it quite the dear man’s COMPANY we want?”—and Harold looked anxious and acute. “If that’s the best arrangement Nanda can make—!”
“If he hears us talking in this way, which strikes me as very horrible,” Nanda interposed very simply and gravely, “I don’t think we’re likely to get anything.”
“Oh Harold’s talk,” Vanderbank protested, “offers, I think, an extraordinary interest; only I’m bound to say it crushes me to the earth. I’ve to make at least, as I listen to him, a big effort to bear up. It doesn’t seem long ago,” he pursued to his young friend, “that I used to feel I was in it; but the way you bring home to me, dreadful youth, that I’m already NOT—!”
Harold looked earnest to understand. “The hungry generations tread you down—is that it?”