“Oh that proves nothing.” She got up as she spoke. “Harold also works Granny.” He only laughed out at first for this, while she went on: “You’ll think I make myself out fearfully deep--I mean in the way of knowing everything without having to be told. That IS, as you say, mamma’s great accomplishment, so it must be hereditary. Besides, there seem to me only too many things one IS told. Only Mr. Longdon has in fact said nothing.”
She had looked about responsibly--not to leave in disorder the garden-nook they had occupied; picking up a newspaper and changing the place of a cushion. “I do think that with him you’re remarkable,” Vanderbank observed--“putting on one side all you seem to know and on the other all he holds his tongue about. What then DOES he say?” the young man asked after a slight pause and perhaps even with a slight irritation.
Nanda glanced round again--she was folding, rather carefully, her paper. Presently her glance met their friend, who, having come out of one of the long windows that opened to the lawn, had stopped there to watch them. “He says just now that luncheon’s ready.”
“I’ve made him,” she said in the drawing-room to Mitchy, “make Mr. Van go with him.”
Mr. Longdon, in the rain, which had come on since the morning, had betaken himself to church, and his other guest, with sufficiently marked good humour, had borne him company. The windows of the drawing-room looked at the wet garden, all vivid and rich in the summer shower, and Mitchy, after seeing Vanderbank turn up his trousers and fling back a last answer to the not quite sincere chaff his submission had engendered, adopted freely and familiarly the prospect not only of a grateful freshened lawn, but of a good hour in the very pick, as he called it, of his actual happy conditions. The favouring rain, the dear old place, the charming serious house, the large inimitable room, the absence of the others, the present vision of what his young friend had given him to count on--the sense of these delights was expressed in his fixed generous glare. He was at first too pleased even to sit down; he measured the great space from end to end, admiring again everything he had admired before and protesting afresh that no modern ingenuity--not even his own, to which he did justice--could create effects of such purity. The final touch in the picture before them was just the composer’s ignorance. Mr. Longdon had not made his house, he had simply lived it, and the “taste” of the place--Mitchy in certain connexions abominated the word--was just nothing more than the beauty of his life. Everything on every side had dropped straight from heaven, with nowhere a bargaining thumb-mark, a single sign of the shop. All this would have been a wonderful theme for discourse in Buckingham Crescent--so happy an exercise for the votaries of that temple of analysis that he repeatedly spoke of their experience of it as crying aloud for Mrs. Brook. The questions it set in motion for the perceptive mind were exactly those that, as he said, most made them feel themselves. Vanderbank’s plea for his morning had been a pile of letters to work off, and Mitchy--then coming down, as he announced from the first, ready for anything--had gone to church with Mr. Longdon and Nanda in the finest spirit of curiosity. He now--after the girl’s remark--turned away from his view of the rain, which he found different somehow from other rain, as everything else was different, and replied that he knew well enough what she could make Mr. Longdon do, but only wondered at Mr. Longdon’s secret for acting on their friend. He was there before her with his hands in his pockets and appreciation winking from every yellow spot in his red necktie. “Afternoon service of a wet Sunday in a small country town is a large order. Does Van do everything the governor wants?”