“To Mr. Longdon? Oh whenever I like,” Nanda replied very gently and simply.
“And when shall you be so good as to like?”
“Well, he goes himself on Saturday, and if I want I can go a few days later.”
“And what day can you go if I want?” Mrs. Brook spoke as with a small sharpness--just softened indeed in time--produced by the sight of a freedom in her daughter’s life that suddenly loomed larger than any freedom of her own. It was still a part of the unsteadiness of the vessel of her anxieties; but she never after all remained publicly long subject to the influence she often comprehensively designated to others as well as to herself as “nastiness.” “What I mean is that you might go the same day, mightn’t you?”
“With him--in the train? I should think so if you wish it.”
“But would HE wish it? I mean would he hate it?”
“I don’t think so at all, but I can easily ask him.”
Mrs. Brook’s head inclined to the chimney and her eyes to the window. “Easily?”
Nanda looked for a moment mystified by her mother’s insistence. “I can at any rate perfectly try it.”
“Remembering even that mamma would never have pushed so?”
Nanda’s face seemed to concede even that condition. “Well,” she at all events serenely replied, “I really think we’re good friends enough for anything.”
It might have been, for the light it quickly produced, exactly what her mother had been working to make her say. “What do you call that then, I should like to know, but his adopting you?”
“Ah I don’t know that it matters much what it’s called.”
“So long as it brings with it, you mean,” Mrs. Brook asked, “all the advantages?”
“Well yes,” said Nanda, who had now begun dimly to smile--“call them advantages.”
Mrs. Brook had a pause. “One would be quite ready to do that if one only knew a little more exactly what they’re to consist of.”
“Oh the great advantage, I feel, is doing something for HIM.”
Nanda’s companion, at this, hesitated afresh. “But doesn’t that, my dear, put the extravagance of your surrender to him on rather an odd footing? Charity, love, begins at home, and if it’s a question of merely GIVING, you’ve objects enough for your bounty without going so far.”
The girl, as her stare showed, was held a moment by her surprise, which presently broke out. “Why, I thought you wanted me so to be nice to him!”