“Yes—worse. I dare say,” he went on, “what I give them—”
“Isn’t as bad as what I do? Oh we must each do our best. But when I hear from you,” Mrs. Brook pursued, “that Nanda had ever permitted herself anything so dreadful as to wire to him, it comes over me afresh that I would have been the perfect one to deal with him if his detestation of me hadn’t prevented.” She was by this time also—but on her feet—before the fire, into which, like her husband, she gazed. “I would never have wired. I’d have gone in for little delicacies and odd things she has never thought of.”
“Oh she doesn’t go in for what you do,” Edward assented.
“She’s as bleak as a chimney-top when the fire’s out, and if it hadn’t been after all for mamma—!” And she lost herself again in the reasons of things.
Her husband’s silence seemed to mark for an instant a deference to her allusion, but there was a limit even to this combination. “You make your mother, I think, keep it up pretty well. But if she HADN’T as you say, done so—?”
“Why we shouldn’t have been anywhere.”
“Well, where are we now? That’s what I want to know.”
Following her own train she had at first no heed for his question. “Without his hatred he would have liked me.” But she came back with a sigh to the actual. “No matter. We must deal with what we’ve got.”
“What HAVE we got?” Edward continued.
Again with no ear for his question his wife turned away, only however, after taking a few vague steps, to approach him with new decision. “If Mr. Longdon’s due will you do me a favour? Will you go back to Nanda—before he arrives—and let her know, though not of course as from ME, that Van has been here half an hour, has had it put well before him that she’s up there and at liberty, and has left the house without seeing her?”