THE AWKWARD AGE
"And, pray, what are fellows who are in the beastly grind of fearfully busy offices? There isn't an old cabhorse in London that's kept at it, I assure you, as I am. Besides," the young man added, "if I'm out every night and off somewhere, like this, for Sunday, can't you understand, my dear child, the fundamental reason of it?"
Nanda, with her eyes on him again, studied an instant this mystery. "Am I to infer with delight that it's the sweet hope of meeting me? It isn't," she continued in a moment, "as if there were any necessity for your saying that. What's the use—?" But, impatiently, she stopped short.
He was eminently gay even if his companion was not. "Because we're such jolly old friends that we really needn't so much as speak at all? Yes, thank goodness—thank goodness." He had been looking around him, taking in the scene; he had dropped his hat on the ground and, completely at his ease, though still more wishing to show it, had crossed his legs and closely folded his arms. "What a tremendously jolly place! If I can't for the life of me recall who they were—the other people—I've the comfort of being sure their minds are an equal blank. Do they even remember the place they had? 'We had some fellows down, at—where was it, the big white house last November?—and there was one of them, out of the What-do-you-call-it?—you know—who might have been a decent enough chap if he had not presumed so on his gifts.'" Vanderbank paused a minute, but his companion said nothing, and he pursued: "It does show, doesn't it?—the fact that we do meet this way—the tremendous change that has taken place in your life in the last three months. I mean, if I'm everywhere, as you said just now, your being just the same."
"Yes—you see what you've done."
"How, what I've done?"
"You plunge into the woods for change, for solitude,"
172
