He gave a sound as of cheer for this luckily firmer ground. “My dear child, I never lent the silly boy five pounds in my life. In fact I like the way you talk of that. I don’t know quite for what you take me, but the number of persons to whom I HAVE lent five pounds--!”
“Is so awfully small”--she took him up on it--“as not to look so very well for you?” She held him an instant as with the fine intelligence of his meaning in this, and then, though not with sharpness, broke out: “Why are you trying to make out that you’re nasty and stingy? Why do you misrepresent--?”
“My natural generosity? I don’t misrepresent anything, but I take, I think, rather markedly good care of money.” She had remained in her place and he was before her on the grass, his hands in his pockets and his manner perhaps a little awkward. “The way you young things talk of it!”
“Harold talks of it--but I don’t think _I_ do. I’m not a bit expensive--ask mother, or even ask father. I do with awfully little--for clothes and things, and I could easily do with still less. Harold’s a born consumer, as Mitchy says; he says also he’s one of those people who will never really want.”
“Ah for that, Mitchy himself will never let him.”
“Well then, with every one helping us all round, aren’t we a lovely family? I don’t speak of it to tell tales, but when you mention hearing from Harold all sorts of things immediately come over me. We seem to be all living more or less on other people, all immensely ‘beholden.’ You can easily say of course that I’m worst of all. The children and their people, at Bognor, are in borrowed quarters--mother got them lent her--as to which, no doubt, I’m perfectly aware that I ought to be there sharing them, taking care of my little brother and sister, instead of sitting here at Mr. Longdon’s expense to expose everything and criticise. Father and mother, in Scotland, are on a grand campaign. Well”--she pulled herself up--“I’m not in THAT at any rate. Say you’ve lent Harold only five shillings,” she went on.
Vanderbank stood smiling. “Well, say I have. I never lend any one whatever more.”
“It only adds to my conviction,” Nanda explained, “that he writes to Mr. Longdon.”
“But if Mr. Longdon doesn’t say so--?” Vanderbank objected.