“Well, I hope that makes up, my dear, for the rate at which we’re doing so at his!”
“His amusement,” said Nanda, “is to see us believe what he says.”
Mr. Longdon thought a moment. “Really, my child, you’re most acute.”
“Oh I haven’t watched life for nothing! Mitchy doesn’t care,” she repeated.
Her companion seemed divided between a desire to draw and a certain fear to encourage her. “Doesn’t care for what?”
She considered an instant, all coherently, and it might have added to Mr. Longdon’s impression of her depth. “Well, for himself. I mean for his money. For anything any one may think. For Lord Petherton, for instance, really at all. Lord Petherton thinks he has helped him--thinks, that is, that Mitchy thinks he has. But Mitchy’s more amused at HIM than at anybody else. He takes every one in.”
“My poor child, you’re of a profundity!” Mr. Longdon murmured.
He spoke almost uneasily, but she was not too much alarmed to continue lucid. “And he likes me, and I know just how much--and just how little. He’s the most generous man in the world. It pleases him to feel that he’s indifferent and splendid--there are so many things it makes up to him for.” The old man listened with attention, and his young friend conscious of it, proceeded as on ground of which she knew every inch. “He’s the son, as you know, of a great bootmaker--‘to all the Courts of Europe’--who left him a large fortune, which had been made, I believe, in the most extraordinary way, by building-speculations as well.”
“Oh yes, I know. It’s astonishing!” her companion sighed.
“Well, everything. That you should be talking as you are--that you should have ‘watched life,’ as you say, to such purpose. That we should any of us be here--most of all that Mr. Mitchett himself should. That your grandmother’s daughter should have brought HER daughter--”
“To stay with a person”--Nanda took it up as, apparently out of delicacy, he fairly failed--“whose father used to take the measure, down on his knees on a little mat, as mamma says, of my grandfather’s remarkably large foot? Yes, we none of us mind. Do you think we should?” Nanda asked.
Mr. Longdon turned it over. “I’ll answer you by a question. Would you marry him?”
“Never.” Then as if to show there was no weakness in her mildness, “Never, never, never,” she repeated.