BOOK FIFTH: THE DUCHESS
lake—to go back to," the Duchess went on, "and I'm on my way to my room to get a letter that I've promised to show him. I shall immediately bring it down, and then, in a few minutes, be able to relieve you. I don't leave her alone too much—one doesn't, you know, in a house full of people, a child of that age. Besides"—and Mr. Longdon's interlocutress was even more confiding—"I do want you, so very intensely, to know her. You, par exemple, you're what I should like to give her." Mr. Longdon looked the Duchess, in acknowledgment of her appeal, straight in the face, and who can tell whether or no she acutely guessed from his expression that he recognized this particular juncture as written on the page of his doom?—whether she heard him inaudibly say "Ah, here it is: I knew it would have to come!" She would at any rate have been astute enough, had this miracle occurred, quite to complete his sense for her own understanding and suffer it to make no difference in the tone in which she still confronted him. "Oh, I take the bull by the horns—I know you haven't wanted to know me. If you had you would have called on me—I've given you plenty of hints and little coughs. Now, you see, I don't cough any more—I just rush at you and grab you. You don't call on me—so I call on you. There isn't any indecency moreover that I won't commit for my child."
Mr. Longdon's impenetrability crashed like glass at the elbow-touch of this large, handsome, practised woman who walked, for him, like some brazen pagan goddess, in a cloud of queer legend. He looked off at her child, who, at a distance and not hearing them, had not moved. "I know she's a great friend of Nanda's."
"Has Nanda told you that?"
"Often—taking such an interest in her."
"I'm glad she thinks so then—though really her interests are so various. But come to my baby. I don't make her come," she explained as she swept him along,
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