“I haven’t asked him.”
She had another, a briefer pause. “Don’t you think it about time you SHOULD?” Once more she waited, then seemed to feel her opportunity wouldn’t. “We’ve worked a bit together, but you don’t take me into your confidence. I dare say you don’t believe I’m quite straight. Don’t you really see how I MUST be?” She had a pleading note which made him at last more consentingly face her. “Don’t you see,” she went on with the advantage of it, “that, having got all I want for myself, I haven’t a motive in the world for spoiling the fun of another? I don’t want in the least, I assure you, to spoil even Mrs. Brook’s; for how will she get a bit less out of him—I mean than she does now—if what you desire SHOULD take place? Honestly, my dear man, that’s quite what I desire, and I only want, over and above, to help you. What I feel for Nanda, believe me, is pure pity. I won’t say I’m frantically grateful to her, because in the long run—one way or another—she’ll have found her account. It nevertheless worries me to see her; and all the more because of this very certitude, which you’ve so kindly just settled for me, that our young man hasn’t really with her mother—”
Whatever the certitude Mr. Longdon had kindly settled, it was in another interest that he at this moment broke in. “Is he YOUR young man too?”
She was not too much amused to cast about her.
“Aren’t such marked ornaments of life a little the property of all who admire and enjoy them?”
“You ‘enjoy’ him?” Mr. Longdon asked in the same straightforward way.
“Immensely.”
His silence for a little seemed the sign of a plan. “What is it he hasn’t done with Mrs. Brook?”
“Well, the thing that WOULD be the complication. He hasn’t gone beyond a certain point. You may ask how one knows such matters, but I’m afraid I’ve not quite a receipt for it. A woman knows, but she can’t tell. They haven’t done, as it’s called, anything wrong.”
Mr. Longdon frowned. “It would be extremely horrid if they had.”