“Let them alone,” Mitchy continued. “We don’t want at all events a general romp.”
“Oh I thought just that,” said Mrs. Brook, “was what the Duchess wished the door locked for! Perhaps moreover”—she returned to Tishy—“he hasn’t yet found the book.”
“He can’t,” Tishy said with simplicity.
“But why in the world—?”
“You see she’s sitting on it”—Tishy felt, it was plain, the responsibility of explanation. “So that unless he pulls her off—”
“He can’t compass his desperate end? Ah I hope he won’t pull her off!” Mrs. Brook wonderfully murmured. It was said in a manner that stirred the circle, and unanimous laughter seemed already to have crowned her invocation, lately uttered, to the social spirit. “But what in the world,” she pursued, “is the book selected for such a position? I hope it’s not a very big one.”
“Oh aren’t the books that are sat upon,” Mr. Cashmore freely speculated, “as a matter of course the bad ones?”
“Not a bit as a matter of course,” Harold as freely replied to him. “They sit, all round, nowadays—I mean in the papers and places—on some awfully good stuff. Why I myself read books that I couldn’t—upon my honour I wouldn’t risk it!—read out to you here.”
“What a pity,” his father dropped with the special shade of dryness that was all Edward’s own, “what a pity you haven’t got one of your favourites to try on us!”
Harold looked about as if it might have been after all a happy thought. “Well, Nanda’s the only girl.”