BOOK TENTH: NANDA
trust you not to assent even more than I want, I should say 'You know what I mean!'" She allowed him, at all events—or tried to allow him—no time for uttered irony before going on: "He was everything you could have wished; quite as beautiful about you—"
"As about you?"—Mr. Longdon took her up.
She demurred. "As about mother." With which she turned away as if it handsomely settled the question. But it only left him, as she went to the window, sitting there sombre. "I like, you know," he brought out as his eyes followed her, "your saying you're not proud! Thank God you are, my dear. Yes—it's better for us."
At this, after a moment, in her place, she turned round to him. "I'm glad I'm anything—whatever you may call it and though I can't call it the same—that's good for you."
He said nothing more for a little, as if, by such a speech, something in him were simplified and softened. "It would be good for me—by which I mean it would be easier for me—if you didn't quite so immensely care for him."
"Oh!" came from Nanda with an accent of attenuation at once so precipitate and so vague that it only made her attitude at first rather awkward. "Oh!" she immediately repeated, but with an increase of the same effect. After which, conscious, she made, as if to save herself, a quick addition. "Dear Mr. Longdon, isn't it rather yourself most—?"
"It would be easier for me," he went on heedless, "if you didn't, my poor child, so wonderfully love him."
"Ah, but I don't—please believe me when I assure you I don't!" she broke out. It burst from her, flaring up, in a queer quaver that ended in something queerer still—in her abrupt collapse, on the spot, into the nearest chair, where she choked with a torrent of tears. Her buried face could only, after a moment, give way to the
453
