THE AWKWARD AGE
Vanderbank showed his interest. "Whereas at your mother's—?"
"Well, you were all afraid."
Vanderbank laughed straight out. "Do you mind my telling her that?"
"Oh, she knows it. I've heard her say herself you were."
"Ah, I was," he concurred. "You know we've spoken of that before."
"I'm speaking now of all of you," said Nanda. "But it was she who was most so, for she tried—I know she did, she told me so—to control you. And it was when you were most controlled—"
Van's amusement took it up. "That we were most deleterious?"
"Yes, because, of course, what's so awfully unutterable is just what we most notice. Tishy knows that," Nanda wonderfully observed.
As the reflection of her tone might have been caught by an observer in Vanderbank's face, it was in all probability caught by his interlocutress, who, superficially, however, need have recognized there—what was all she showed—but the right manner of waiting for dinner. "The better way then is to dash right in? That's what our friend here does?"
"Oh, you know what she does!" the girl replied as if with a sudden drop of interest in the question. She also turned to the opening of the door.
It was Tishy who at last appeared, and her guest had his greeting ready. "We're talking of the delicate matters as to which you think it's better to dash right in; but I'm bound to say your inviting a hungry man to dinner doesn't appear to be one of them."
The sign of Tishy Grendon—as it had been often called in a society in which variety of reference had brought to high perfection, for usual safety, the sense of
326
