THE AWKWARD AGE
such purity. The final touch in all the picture before them was just the painter's ignorance. Mr. Longdon had not made his house, he had simply lived it, and the "taste" of the place—Mitchy in certain connections abominated the word—was nothing more than the beauty of his life. Everything, on every side, had dropped straight from heaven, with nowhere a bargaining thumbmark, a single sign of the shop. All this would have been a wonderful theme for discourse in Buckingham Crescent—so happy an exercise for the votaries of that temple of analysis that he repeatedly spoke of their experience of it as crying aloud for Mrs. Brook. The questions it set in motion for the perceptive mind were exactly those that, as he said, most made them feel themselves. Vanderbank's plea for his morning had been a pile of letters to work off, and Mitchy—then coming down, as he announced from the first, ready for anything—had gone to church with Mr. Longdon and Nanda in the finest spirit of curiosity. He now—after the girl's remark—turned away from his view of the rain, which he found different somehow from other rain, as everything else was different, and replied that he knew well enough what she could make Mr. Longdon do, but only wondered at Mr. Longdon's secret for acting on their friend. He was there before her with his hands in his pockets and appreciation winking from every yellow spot of his red necktie. "Afternoon service, of a wet Sunday in a small country town, is a large order. Does Van do everything the proprietor wants?"
"He may perhaps have had a suspicion of what I want," Nanda explained. "If I want particularly to talk to you—"
"He has got out of the way to give me a chance? Well then, he's, as usual, simply magnificent. How can I express the bliss of finding myself enclosed with you in this sweet old security, this really unimagined sanctity?
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