“Yes—fortunately for you.”
“Ah but I distinctly warn you that I mean to do my very best for it!”
Nanda viewed it all with as near an approach to gaiety as she often achieved. “Well, if you should ever succeed it would be a dark day for you.”
“You bristle with your own guns,” he pursued, “but the ingenuity of a lifetime shall be devoted to my taking you on some quarter on which you’re not prepared.”
“And what quarter, pray, will that be?”
“Ah I’m not such a fool as to begin by giving you a tip!” Mitchy on this turned off with an ambiguous but unmistakeably natural sigh; he looked at photographs, he took up a book or two as Vanderbank had done, and for a couple of minutes there was silence between them. “What does stretch before me,” he resumed after an interval during which clearly, in spite of his movements, he had looked at nothing—“what does stretch before me is the happy prospect of my feeling that I’ve found in you a friend with whom, so utterly and unreservedly, I can always go to the bottom of things. This luxury, you see now, of our freedom to look facts in the face is one of which, I promise you, I mean fully to avail myself.” He stopped before her again, and again she was silent. “It’s so awfully jolly, isn’t it? that there’s not at last a single thing that we can’t take our ease about. I mean that we can’t intelligibly name and comfortably tackle. We’ve worked through the long tunnel of artificial reserves and superstitious mysteries, and I at least shall have only to feel that in showing every confidence and dotting every ‘i’ I follow the example you so admirably set. You go down to the roots? Good. It’s all I ask!”
He had dropped into a chair as he talked, and so long as she remained in her own they were confronted; but she presently got up and, the next moment, while he kept his place, was busy restoring order to the objects both her visitors had disarranged. “If you weren’t delightful you’d be dreadful!”
“There we are! I could easily, in other words, frighten you if I would.”
She took no notice of the remark, only, after a few more scattered touches, producing an observation of her own. “He’s going, all the same, Mr. Van, to be charming to mother. We’ve settled that.”
“Ah then he CAN make time—?”