“There it is. And I like much better,” Mrs. Brook went on, “our speaking of it as delicacy than as duplicity. If you understand, it’s so much saved.”
“What I always understand more than anything else,” he returned, “is the general truth that you’re prodigious.”
It was perhaps a little as relapse from tension that she had nothing against that. “As for instance when it WOULD be so easy—!”
“Yes, to take up what lies there, you yet so splendidly abstain.”
“You literally press upon me my opportunity? It’s YOU who are splendid!” she rather strangely laughed.
“Don’t you at least want to say,” he went on with a slight flush, “what you MOST obviously and naturally might?”
Appealed to on the question of underlying desire, Mrs. Brook went through the decent form of appearing to try to give it the benefit of any doubt. “Don’t I want, you mean, to find out before you go up what YOU want? Shall you be too disappointed,” she asked, “if I say that, since I shall probably learn, as we used to be told as children, ‘all in good time,’ I can wait till the light comes out of itself?”
Vanderbank still lingered. “You ARE deep!”
“You’ve only to be deeper.”
“That’s easy to say. I’m afraid at any rate you won’t think I am,” he pursued after a pause, “if I ask you what in the world—since Harold does keep Lady Fanny so quiet—Cashmore still requires Nanda’s direction for.”