“Between you all, at any rate,” she said more gaily, “you’ve brought me down.”
Vanderbank made no answer till they met their friend, when, by way of greeting, he simply echoed her words. “Between us all, you’ll be glad to know, we’ve brought her down.”
Mr. Longdon looked from one of them to the other. “Where have you been together?”
Nanda was the first to respond. “Only talking--on a bench.”
“Well, _I_ want to talk on a bench!” Their friend showed a spirit.
“With me, of course?”--Vanderbank met it with encouragement.
The girl said nothing, but Mr. Longdon sought her eyes. “No--with Nanda. You must mingle in the crowd.”
“Ah,” the their companion laughed, “you two are the crowd!”
Vanderbank on this, giving it up with the air of amused accommodation that was never--certainly for these two--at fault in him, offered to Mr. Longdon before departing the handshake of greeting he had omitted; a demonstration really the warmer for the tone of the joke that went with it. “Intrigant!”
Nanda praised to the satellite so fantastically described the charming spot she had quitted, with the effect that they presently took fresh possession of it, finding the beauty of the view deepened as the afternoon grew old and the shadows long. They were of a comfortable agreement on these matters, by which moreover they were but little delayed, one of the pair at least being too conscious, for the hour, of still other phenomena than the natural and peaceful process that filled the air. “Well, you must tell me about these things,” Mr. Longdon sociably said: he had joined his young friend with a budget of impressions rapidly gathered at the house; as to which his appeal to her for a light or two may be taken as the measure of the confidence now ruling their relations. He had come to feel at last, he mentioned, that he could allow for most differences; yet in such a situation as the present bewilderment could only come back. There were no differences in the world--so it had all ended for him--but those that marked at every turn the manners he had for three months been observing in good society. The general wide deviation of this body occupied his mind to the exclusion of almost everything else, and he had finally been brought to believe that even in his slow-paced prime he must have hung behind his contemporaries. He had not supposed at the moment--in the fifties and the sixties--that he passed for old-fashioned, but life couldn’t have left him so far in the rear had the start between them originally been fair. This was the way he had more than once put the matter to the girl; which gives a sufficient hint, it is hoped, of the range of some of their talk. It had always wound up indeed, their talk, with some assumption of the growth of his actual understanding; but it was just these pauses in the fray that seemed to lead from time to time to a sharper clash. It was apt to be when he felt as if he had exhausted surprises that he really received his greatest shocks. There were no such queer-tasting draughts as some of those yielded by the bucket that had repeatedly, as he imagined, touched the bottom of the well. “Now this sudden invasion of somebody’s--heaven knows whose--house, and our dropping down on it like a swarm of locusts: I dare say it isn’t civil to criticise it when one’s going too, so almost culpably, with the stream; but what are people made of that they consent, just for money, to the violation of their homes?”