Vanderbank gave a pleasant tragic headshake. “We speak a different language.”
“Ah but I think I perfectly understand yours!”
“That’s just my anguish—and your advantage. It’s awfully curious,” Vanderbank went on to Nanda, “but I feel as if I must figure to him, you know, very much as Mr. Longdon figures to me. Mr. Longdon doesn’t somehow get into me. Yet I do, I think, into him. But we don’t matter!”
“‘We’?”—Nanda, with her eyes on him, echoed it.
“Mr. Longdon and I. It can’t be helped, I suppose,” he went on, for Tishy, with sociable sadness, “but it IS short innings.”
Mrs. Grendon, who was clearly credulous, looked positively frightened. “Ah but, my dear, thank you! I haven’t begun to LIVE.”
“Well, I have—that’s just where it is,” said Harold. “Thank you all the more, old Van, for the tip.”
There was an announcement just now at the door, and Tishy turned to meet the Duchess, with Harold, almost as if he had been master of the house, figuring but a step behind her. “Don’t mind HER,” Vanderbank immediately said to the companion with whom he was left, “but tell me, while I still have hold of you, who wrote my name on the French novel that I noticed a few minutes since in the other room?”
Nanda at first only wondered. “If it’s there—didn’t YOU?”
He just hesitated. “If it were here you’d see if it’s my hand.”