THE AWKWARD AGE
"For the place, the whole thing, as you call it, that he shows me."
Mitchy had a short silence that might have represented a change of color. "It isn't good enough?" But he instantly took himself up. "Of course he wants—as I do—to treat you with a tact!"
"Oh, it's all right," Vanderbank immediately said. "Your 'tact'—yours and his—is marvellous, and Nanda's is greatest of all."
Mitchy's momentary renewal of stillness was addressed, he managed, somehow, not obscurely to convey, to the last clause of his friend's speech. "If you're not sure," he presently resumed, "why can't you frankly ask him?"
Vanderbank again, as the phrase is, "mooned" about a little. "Because I don't know that it would do."
"What do you mean by 'do'?"
"Well, that it would be exactly—what do you call it—'square.' Or even quite delicate or decent. To take from him, in the way of an assurance so handsomely offered, so much, and then to ask for more: I don't feel I can do it. Besides, I have my little conviction. To the question itself he might easily reply that it's none of my business."
"I see," Mitchy dropped. "Such an inquiry might suggest to him moreover that you're hesitating more than you perhaps really are."
"Oh, as to that," said Vanderbank, "I think he practically knows how much."
"And how little?" He met this, however, with no more form than if it had been a poor joke; so that Mitchy also smoked for a moment in silence. "It's your coming down here, you mean, for these three or four days, that will have fixed it?"
The question this time was one to which the speakei might have expected an answer, but Vanderbank's only
314
