"When poor mummy
thinks, you know, that Nanda might have had them--!"
Lady Fanny's attention, for that matter, had resisted them as little.
"Well, I dare say that if I had wanted _I_ might!"
"Lord--COULD you have stood him?" the young man returned. "But I believe
women can stand anything!" he profoundly concluded. His mother
meanwhile, recovering herself, had begun to ejaculate on the prints in
Aggie's arms, and he was then diverted from the sense of what he
"personally," as he would have said, couldn't have stood, by a glance at
Lord Petherton's trophy, for which he made a prompt grab. "The bone of
contention?" Lord Petherton had let it go and Harold remained arrested
by the cover. "Why blest if it hasn't Van's name!"
"Van's?"--his mother was near enough to effect her own snatch, after
which she swiftly faced the proprietor of the volume. "Dear man, it's
the last thing you lent me! But I don't think," she added, turning to
Tishy, "that I ever passed such a production on to YOU."
"It was just seeing Mr. Van's hand," Aggie conscientiously explained,
"that made me think one was free--!"
"But it isn't Mr. Van's hand!"--Mrs. Brook quite smiled at the error.
She thrust the book straight at Mr. Longdon. "IS that Mr. Van's hand?"
Holding the disputed object, which he had put on his nippers to glance
at, he presently, without speaking, looked over these aids straight at
Nanda, who looked as straight back at him.
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