“DO you? I should rather ask,” the young man gaily enough replied.
“Why should I not? How should I not? You know what I know.” Then as to explain herself and attenuate a little the sudden emphasis with which she had spoken: “I remember your once telling me that I must take in things at my pores.”
Her companion stared, but with his laugh again changed his posture. “That you’ must--?”
“And when did I make this extraordinary charge?”
“Ah then,” said Nanda, “you admit it IS a charge. It was a long time ago--when I was a little girl. Which made it worse!” she dropped.
It made it at all events now for Vanderbank more amusing. “Ah not worse--better!”
She thought a moment. “Because in that case I mightn’t have understood? But that I do understand is just what you’ve always meant.”
“‘Always,’ my dear Nanda? I feel somehow,” he rejoined very kindly, “as if you overwhelmed me!”
“You ‘feel’ as if I did--but the reality is just that I don’t. The day I overwhelm you, Mr. Van--!” She let that pass, however; there was too much to say about it and there was something else much simpler. “Girls understand now. It has got to be faced, as Tishy says.”
“Oh well,” Vanderbank laughed, “we don’t require Tishy to point that out to us. What are we all doing most of the time but trying to face it?”
“Doing? Aren’t you doing rather something very different? You’re just trying to dodge it. You’re trying to make believe--not perhaps to yourselves but to US--that it isn’t so.”
“But surely you don’t want us to be any worse!”
She shook her head with brisk gravity. “We don’t care really what you are.”
His amusement now dropped to her straighter. “Your ‘we’ is awfully beautiful. It’s charming to hear you speak for the whole lovely lot. Only you speak, you know, as if you were just the class apart that you yet complain of our--by our scruples--implying you to be.”
She considered this objection with her eyes on his face. “Well then we do care. Only--!”
“Oh yes--no doubt; it’s a big subject.” She appeared to wish to meet him on everything reasonable. “Even Mr. Longdon admits that.”
Vanderbank wondered. “You mean you talk over with him--!”
“The subject of girls? Why we scarcely discuss anything else.”
“Oh no wonder then you’re not bored. But you mean,” he asked, “that he recognises the inevitable change--?”