“Ah but, for you and me who know life, it isn’t THAT that—if other things had made for it—would have prevented! As it happens, however, we’ve got off easily. She doesn’t speak to him—!”
She had forms he could only take up. “‘Speak’ to him—?”
“Why as much as she would have liked to be able to believe.”
“Then where’s the danger of which you appear to wish to warn me?”
“Just in her feeling in the case as most women would feel. You see she did what she could for her daughter. She did, I’m bound to say, as that sort of thing goes among you people, a good deal. She treasured up, she nursed along Mitchy, whom she would also, though of course not so much, have liked herself. Nanda could have kept him on with a word, becoming thereby so much the less accessible for YOUR plan. That would have thoroughly obliged her mother, but your little English girls, in these altered times—oh I know how you feel them!—don’t stand on such trifles; and—even if you think it odd of me—I can’t defend myself, though I’ve so directly profited, against a certain compassion also for Mrs. Brook’s upset. As a good-natured woman I feel in short for both of them. I deplore all round what’s after all a rather sad relation. Only, as I tell you, Nanda’s the one, I naturally say to myself, for me now most to think of; if I don’t assume too much, that is, that you don’t suffer by my freedom.”
Mr. Longdon put by with a mere drop of his eyes the question of his suffering: there was so clearly for him an issue more relevant. “What do you know of my ‘plan’?”
“Why, my dear man, haven’t I told you that ever since Mertle I’ve made out your hand? What on earth for other people can your action look like but an adoption?”
“Of—a—HIM?”
“You’re delightful. Of—a—HER! If it does come to the same thing for you, so much the better. That at any rate is what we’re all taking it for, and Mrs. Brook herself en tete. She sees—through your generosity—Nanda’s life more or less, at the worst, arranged for, and that’s just what gives her a good conscience.”
If Mr. Longdon breathed rather hard it seemed to show at least that he followed. “What does she want of a good conscience?”