“You’ll see--when you do see. She has no features. No, not one,” Vanderbank inexorably pursued; “unless indeed you put it that she has two or three too many. What I was going to say was that she has in her expression all that’s charming in her nature. But beauty, in London”--and feeling that he held his visitor’s attention he gave himself the pleasure of freely presenting his idea--“staring glaring obvious knock-down beauty, as plain as a poster on a wall, an advertisement of soap or whiskey, something that speaks to the crowd and crosses the footlights, fetches such a price in the market that the absence of it, for a woman with a girl to marry, inspires endless terrors and constitutes for the wretched pair (to speak of mother and daughter alone) a sort of social bankruptcy. London doesn’t love the latent or the lurking, has neither time nor taste nor sense for anything less discernible than the red flag in front of the steam-roller. It wants cash over the counter and letters ten feet high. Therefore you see it’s all as yet rather a dark question for poor Nanda--a question that in a way quite occupies the foreground of her mother’s earnest little life. How WILL she look, what will be thought of her and what will she be able to do for herself? She’s at the age when the whole thing--speaking of her ‘attractions,’ her possible share of good looks--is still to a degree in a fog. But everything depends on it.” Mr. Longdon had by this time come back to him. “Excuse my asking it again--for you take such jumps: what, once more, do you mean by everything?” “Why naturally her marrying. Above all her marrying early.” Mr. Longdon stood before the sofa. “What do you mean by early?” “Well, we do doubtless get up later than at Beccles; but that gives us, you see, shorter days. I mean in a couple of seasons. Soon enough,” Vanderbank developed, “to limit the strain--!” He was moved to higher gaiety by his friend’s expression. “What do you mean by the strain?” “Well, the complication of her being there.” “Being where?” “You do put one through!” Vanderbank laughed. But he showed himself perfectly prepared. “Out of the school-room and where she is now. In her mother’s drawing-room. At her mother’s fireside.” Mr. Longdon stared. “But where else should she be?” “At her husband’s, don’t you see?” He looked as if he quite saw, yet was nevertheless not to be put off from his original challenge. “Ah certainly; but not as if she had been pushed down the chimney. All in good time.” “What do you call good time?” “Why time to make herself loved.” Vanderbank wondered. “By the men who come to the house?” Mr. Longdon slightly attenuated this way of putting it. “Yes--and in the home circle. Where’s the ‘strain’ of her being suffered to be a member of it?” III