“Ah you come back to that?” she wearily asked. “And you find it, with all you’ve to think about, unforgettable?”
“Oh but there was a wild light in your eye—!”
“Well,” Mrs. Brook said, “you see it now quite gone out.” She had spoken more sadly than sharply, but her impatience had the next moment a flicker. “I called Nanda in because I wanted to.”
“Precisely; but what I don’t make out, you see, is what you’ve since gained by it.”
“You mean she only hates me the more?”
Van’s impatience, in the movement with which he turned from her, had a flare still sharper. “You know I’m incapable of meaning anything of the sort.”
She waited a minute while his back was presented. “I sometimes think in effect that you’re incapable of anything straightforward.”
Vanderbank’s movement had not been to the door, but he almost reached it after giving her, on this, a hard look. He then stopped short, however, to stare an instant still more fixedly into the hat he held in his hand; the consequence of which in turn was that he the next minute stood again before her chair. “Don’t you call it straightforward of me just not to have come for so long?”
She had again to take time to say. “Is that an allusion to what—by the loss of your beautiful presence—I’ve failed to ‘gain’? I dare say at any rate”—she gave him no time to reply—“that you feel you’re quite as straightforward as I and that we’re neither of us creatures of mere rash impulse. There was a time in fact, wasn’t there? when we rather enjoyed each other’s dim depths. If I wanted to fawn on you,” she went on, “I might say that, with such a comrade in obliquity to wind and double about with, I’d risk losing myself in the mine. But why retort or recriminate? Let us not, for God’s sake, be vulgar—we haven’t yet, bad as it is, come to THAT. I CAN be, no doubt—I some day MUST be: I feel it looming at me out of the awful future as an inevitable fate. But let it be for when I’m old and horrible; not an hour before. I do want to live a little even yet. So you ought to let me off easily—even as I let you.”
“Oh I know,” said Vanderbank handsomely, “that there are things you don’t put to me! You show a tact!”