Mr. Longdon did the same, but with more consideration now. “Is it your expectation that I shall speak to Mr. Mitchett?”
“Don’t flatter yourself he won’t speak to YOU!”
Mr. Longdon made it out. “As supposing me, you mean, an interested party?”
She clapped her gloved hands for joy. “It’s a delight to hear you practically admit that you ARE one! Mr. Mitchett will take anything from you--above all perfect candour. It isn’t every day one meets YOUR kind, and he’s a connoisseur. I leave it to you--I leave it to you.”
She spoke as if it were something she had thrust bodily into his hands and wished to hurry away from. He put his hands behind him--straightening himself a little, half-kindled, still half-confused. “You’re all extraordinary people!”
She gave a toss of her head that showed her as not so dazzled. “You’re the best of us, caro mio--you and Aggie: for Aggie’s as good as you. Mitchy’s good too, however--Mitchy’s beautiful. You see it’s not only his money. He’s a gentleman. So are you. There aren’t so many. But we must move fast,” she added more sharply.
“What should I mean but what I say? If Nanda doesn’t get a husband early in the business--”
“Well?” said Mr. Longdon, as she appeared to pause with the weight of her idea.
“Why she won’t get one late--she won’t get one at all. One, I mean, of the kind she’ll take. She’ll have been in it over-long for THEIR taste.”
She had moved, looking off and about her--little Aggie always on her mind--to the flight of steps, where she again hung fire; and had really ended by producing in him the manner of keeping up with her to challenge her. “Been in what?”
She went down a few steps while he stood with his face full of perceptions strained and scattered. “Why in the air they themselves have infected for her!”
Late that night, in the smoking room, when the smokers--talkers and listeners alike--were about to disperse, Mr. Longdon asked Vanderbank to stay, and then it was that the young man, to whom all the evening he had not addressed a word, could make out why, a little unnaturally, he had prolonged his vigil. “I’ve something particular to say to you and I’ve been waiting. I hope you don’t mind. It’s rather important.” Vanderbank expressed on the spot the liveliest desire to oblige him and, quickly lighting another cigarette, mounted again to the deep divan with which a part of the place was furnished. The smoking-room at Mertle was not unworthy of the general nobleness, and the fastidious spectator had clearly been reckoned on in the great leather-covered lounge that, raised by a step or two above the floor, applied its back to two quarters of the wall and enjoyed most immediately a view of the billiard-table. Mr. Longdon continued for a minute to roam with the air of dissimulated absence that, during the previous hour and among the other men, his companion’s eye had not lost; he pushed a ball or two about, examined the form of an ash-stand, swung his glasses almost with violence and declined either to smoke or to sit down. Vanderbank, perched aloft on the bench and awaiting developments, had a little the look of some prepossessing criminal who, in court, should have changed places with the judge. He was unlike many a man of marked good looks in that the effect of evening dress was not, with a perversity often observed in such cases, to over-emphasise his fineness. His type was rather chastened than heightened, and he sat there moreover with a primary discretion quite in the note of the deference that from the first, with his friend of the elder fashion, he had taken as imposed. He had a strong sense for shades of respect and was now careful to loll scarcely more than with an official superior. “If you ask me,” Mr. Longdon presently continued, “why at this hour of the night--after a day at best too heterogeneous--I don’t keep over till to-morrow whatever I may have to say, I can only tell you that I appeal to you now because I’ve something on my mind that I shall sleep the better for being rid of.”