Henry James

“ Longdon smiled through his tears—“but if you had known Lady Julia you’d understand. It’s SHE again, as I first knew her, to the life; and not only in feature, in stature, in colour, in movement, but in every bodily mark and sign, in every look of the eyes above all—oh to a degree!—in the sound, in the charm of the voice.” He spoke low and confidentially, but with an intensity that now relieved him—he was as restless as with a discovery. He moved about as with a sacred awe—he might a few steps away have been in the very presence. “She’s ALL Lady Julia. There isn’t a touch of her mother. ”

“ Brook was a little short, and also as she added as if to banish a slight awkwardness: “But don’t let it discourage you.”
Nanda seemed an instant to weigh the advice, and the whole thing would have been striking as another touch in the picture of the odd want, on the part of each, of any sense of levity in the other. Whatever escape, face to face, mother or daughter might ever seek would never be the humorous one—a circumstance, notwithstanding, that would not in every case have failed to make their interviews droll for a third person. ”

“ Mitchy at first, for all reward, only glared at her. "Charming, Nanda—charming!"
"A man's giant enough for Lord Petherton," she went on, "when his fortune's gigantic. He preys upon you."
His hands in his pockets and his legs much apart, Mitchy sat there as in a posture adapted to her simplicity. "You're adorable. You don't. But it is rather horrid, isn't it?" he presently went on.
Her momentary silence would have been by itself enough of an answer. "Nothing—of all you speak of," she nevertheless returned, "will matter then. She'll so simplify your life." ”

“ Mr. Longdon's smile was queer. "I can't prevent him. I'm not a great house—to give orders to go over me. The kindness is Mr. Vanderbank's own, and I've taken up, I'm afraid, a great deal of his time."
"You have indeed." Mrs. Brook was undiscouraged. "He has been talking with me just now of nothing else. You may say," she went on, "that it's I who have kept him at it. So I have, for his pleasure's a joy to us. If you can't prevent what he feels, you know, you can't prevent, either, what we feel." ”

“ Mrs. Brook turned impatiently away. "You've certainly—with your talk about 'warning'—the happiest expressions!" She put her face into the flowers as he had done just before; then as she raised it: "What kind of a monster are you trying to make me out?"
"My dear lady"—Vanderbank was prompt—"I really don't think I say anything but what's fair. Isn't it just my loyalty to you, in fact, that has in this case positively strained my discretion?"
She shook her head in mere mild despair. "'Loyalty' again is exquisite. The tact of men has a charm quite its own. ”

“ Mitchy’s appreciation was no bar to his amusement. “You’re wonderfully right about us. But still it was a stroke.”
If Mrs. Brook was less diverted she followed perhaps more closely. “If you do me so much justice then, why did you put to me such a cold cruel question?—I mean when you so oddly challenged me on my handing on your news to Mitchy. If the principal beauty of our effort to live together is—and quite according to your own eloquence—in our sincerity, I simply obeyed the impulse to do the sincere thing. If we’re not sincere we’re nothing.” ”

“ Nanda completed the simple history. “To-day it’s Mitchy who bundles, and I believe that really he bundled only yesterday. He turned in his people and here we are.”
“Here we are, here we are!” her friend more gravely echoed. “Well, it’s splendid!”
As if at a note in his voice her eyes, while his own still strayed away, just fixed him. “Don’t you think it’s really rather exciting? Everything’s ready, the feast all spread, and with nothing to blunt our curiosity but the general knowledge that there will be people and things—with nothing but that we comfortably take our places.” ”

“ Do you know Mitchy?" Mrs. Brook suddenly asked.
"Oh yes, he knows Mitchy"—Vanderbank had approached again.
"Then make him tell him"—she put it before the young man as a charming turn for them all. "Mitchy can be refined when he tries."
"Oh dear—when Mitchy 'tries'!" Vanderbank laughed. "I think I should rather, for the job, offer him to Mr. Longdon as abandoned to his native wild impulse."
"I like Mr. Mitchett," the old man said, endeavoring to look his hostess straight in the eye, and speaking as if somewhat to defy her to convict him, even from the point of view of Beccles, of a mistake. ”

“ Therefore it WILL be a difficulty for us, cara mia, don’t you see? if we decide suddenly, under the spell of your influence, that our daughter must break off a friendship—it WILL be a difficulty for us to put the thing to Nanda herself in such a way as that she shall have some sort of notion of what suddenly possesses us. Then there’ll be the much stiffer job of putting it to poor Tishy. Yet if her house IS an impossible place what else is one to do? Carrie Donner’s to be there, and Carrie Donner’s a nature apart; but how can we ask even a little lamb like Tishy to give up her own sister? ”

“ Longdon's different from Tishy."
Her mother again hesitated. "You mean, of course, he knows more?"
The girl considered it. "He doesn't know more. But he knows other things—and he's pleasanter than Mitchy."
"You mean because he doesn't want to marry you?"
It was as if she had not heard that Nanda continued: "Well, he's more beautiful."
"O-oh!" cried Mrs. Brook, with a drawn-out extravagance of comment that amounted to an impugnment even by herself of her taste.
It contributed to Nanda's quietness. "He's one of the most beautiful people in the world." ”

“ Brook, without an answer for the question, appeared suddenly to have plunged into a sea of thought. "The only way for Nanda to have been really nice—"
"Would have been for you to be like Jane?"
Mitchy and his hostess seemed for a minute, on this, to gaze together at the tragic truth. Then she shook her head. "We see our mistakes too late." She repeated the movement, but as if to let it all go, and Vanderbank, meanwhile, pulling out his watch, had got up with a laugh that showed some inattention and made to Mitchy a remark about their walking away together. ”

“ Vanderbank went on, "that I've that sort of fulcrum for salvation which consists at least in a deep consciousness and the absence of a rag of illusion, I shall appear to say that I'm different from the world I live in and to that extent present myself as superior and fatuous. Try me, at any rate. Let me try myself. Don't abandon me. See what can be done with me. Perhaps I'm after all a case. I shall at any rate cling to you."
"You're too clever—you're too clever: that's what's the matter with you all!" Mr. Longdon sighed.
"With us all?" Vanderbank echoed. ”

“ Vanderbank made no answer till they met their friend, when, by way of greeting, he simply echoed her words.
"Between us all, you'll be glad to know, we've brought her down."
Mr. Longdon looked from one of them to the other. "Where have you been together?"
Nanda was the first to respond. "Only talking—on a bench."
"Well, I want to talk on a bench!" The old man showed a spirit.
"With me, of course?"—Vanderbank met it with eagerness.
The girl said nothing, but Mr. Longdon sought her eyes. "No—with Nanda. You must mingle in the crowd." ”

“ Mrs. Brook thought again. "I'm glad she is. He's too sweet. By hand!—it must have been so he sent them to mamma. He wouldn't for the world wire."
"Oh, Nanda has often wired to him," her father returned.
"Then she ought to be ashamed of herself. But how," said Mrs. Brook, "do you know?"
"Oh, I know when we're in a thing like this."
"Yet you complain of her want of intimacy with you! It turns out that you're as thick as thieves."
Edward looked at this charge as he looked at all old friends, without a sign—to call a sign—of recognition. ”

“ He had an extraordinary smile. “His mother.”
She exclaimed, colouring, on her mistake, and he added: “I’m not so bad as that. But you’re none of you like them.”
“Wasn’t she pretty?” Nanda asked.
“Very handsome. But it makes no difference. She herself to-day wouldn’t know him.”
She gave a small gasp. “His own mother wouldn’t—?”
His headshake just failed of sharpness. “No, nor he her. There’s a link missing.” Then as if after all she might take him too seriously, “Of course it’s I,” he more gently moralised, “who have lost the link in my sleep. ”

“ Vanderbank, still with a certain levity, exclaimed.
"And what is the work?"
The young man hesitated. "Ask him. He'll like to tell you."
"Yet he seemed to have but little to say." Mr. Longdon exactly measured it again.
"Ah, not about that. Try him."
He looked more sharply at his host, as if vaguely suspicious of a trap; then, not less vaguely, he sighed. "Well, it's what I came up for—to try you all. But do they live on that?" he continued.
Vanderbank once more just faltered. "One doesn't quite know what they live on. ”

“ He hasn’t five horrible unmarried sisters for his wife to have always on a visit. The way your women don’t marry is the ruin here of society, and I’ve been assured in good quarters—though I don’t know so much about that—the ruin also of conversation and of literature. Isn’t it precisely just a little to keep Nanda herself from becoming that kind of appendage—say to poor Harold, say, one of these days, to her younger brother and sister—that friends like you and me feel the importance of bestirring ourselves in time? ”

“ Vanderbank had not been in the room ten seconds before he showed ever so markedly that he had arrived to be kind. Kindness therefore becomes for us, by a quick turn of the glass that reflects the whole scene, the high pitch of the concert—a kindness that almost immediately filled the place, to the exclusion of everything else, with a familiar friendly voice, a brightness of good looks and good intentions, a constant though perhaps sometimes misapplied laugh, a superabundance almost of interest, inattention and movement. ”

“ Curiously wanting as she seemed both in timidity and in levity, she was to a certainty not self-conscious—she was extraordinarily simple. Mr. Longdon looked at her now with an evident surrender to his extreme interest, and it might well have perplexed him to see her at once so downright as from experience and yet of so fresh and sweet a tenderness of youth.
“That’s right, that’s right, my dear young lady: never, never give up a friend for anything any one says!” ”

“ With so many fine mysteries playing about him, there was relief, at the point he had reached, rather than alarm, in the thought of knowing the worst; which it pressed upon him, somehow, that the Duchess must not only supremely know, but must, in any relation, most naturally communicate. It fluttered him rather that a person who had an understanding with Lord Petherton should so single him out as to wish for one also with himself: such a person must either have great variety of mind or have a wonderful idea of his variety. ”

“ Nanda looked about her as if weighing many things; after which her eyes came back to him. "Do you mind if I don't sit down?"
"I don't mind if you stand on your head—at the pass we've come to."
"I shall not try your patience," the girl good-humoredly replied, "so far as that. I only want you not to be worried if I walk about a little."
Mr. Longdon, without a movement, kept his posture. "Oh, I can't oblige you there. I shall be worried. I've come on purpose to be worried, and the more I surrender myself to the rack the more, I seem to feel, we shall have threshed our business out. ”

“ Mrs. Brook asked, “all the advantages?”
“Well yes,” said Nanda, who had now begun dimly to smile—“call them advantages.”
Mrs. Brook had a pause. “One would be quite ready to do that if one only knew a little more exactly what they’re to consist of.”
“Oh the great advantage, I feel, is doing something for HIM.”
Nanda’s companion, at this, hesitated afresh. “But doesn’t that, my dear, put the extravagance of your surrender to him on rather an odd footing? Charity, love, begins at home, and if it’s a question of merely GIVING, you’ve objects enough for your bounty without going so far.” ”

“ My grandmother must have been awfully nice," the girl rambled on, "and I somehow don't see myself at all as the same sort of person."
"Oh, I don't say you're in the least the same sort: all I allude to," Mr. Longdon returned, "is the miracle of the physical heredity. Nothing could be less like her than your manner and your talk."
Nanda looked at him with all her honesty. "They're not so good, you must think."
He hung fire an instant, but was as honest as she. "You're separated from her by a gulf—and not only of time. Personally, you see, you breathe a different air." ”

“ She has invented a nuance of her own, and she has done it all by herself, for Edward figures in her drawing-room only as one of those queer extinguishers of fire in the corridors of hotels. He's just a bucket on a peg. The men, the young and the clever ones, find it a house—and Heaven knows they're right—with intellectual elbow-room, with freedom of talk. ”

“ He looked at her an instant as if with the fancy that she might have derived that impression from Harold. "What has that to do with it? Does a rich man enjoy any more than a poor his wife's making a fool of him?"
Her eyes opened wider: it was one of her very few ways of betraying amusement. There was little indeed to be amused at here except his choice of the particular invidious name. "You know I don't believe a word you say."
Mr. Cashmore drank his tea, then rose to carry the cup somewhere and put it down, declining, with a motion, any assistance. ”

“ What on earth," the girl pursued, "do you take us for?"
"Oh, it's all right!" breathed Mitchy, divinely pacific. "I'm sure I don't know whether it is; I shouldn't wonder if it were in fact all wrong. But what at least is certainly right is for one not to pretend anything else. There I am for you, at any rate. Now the beauty of Aggie is that she knows nothing—but absolutely, utterly: not the least little tittle of anything."
It was barely visible that Mitchy hesitated, and he spoke quite gravely. "Have you tried her?"
"Oh yes. And Tishy has." His gravity had been less than Nanda's. ”

“ His action had already been, with however little purpose, to present the region to his interlocutor in a favourable light. Vanderbank, for that matter, had the kind of imagination that likes to PLACE an object, even to the point of losing sight of it in the conditions; he already saw the nice old nook it must have taken to keep a man of intelligence so fresh while suffering him to remain so fine. The product of Beccles accepted at all events a cigarette—still much as a joke and an adventure—and looked about him as if even more pleased than he expected. ”

“ That they WERE as good friends as if Nanda had not been her daughter was a truth that no passage between them might fail in one way or another to illustrate. Nanda had gathered up, for that matter, early in life, a flower of maternal wisdom: “People talk about conscience, but it seems to me one must just bring it up to a certain point and leave it there. You can let your conscience alone if you’re nice to the second housemaid.” ”