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 debated. "One doesn't quite know what they live on.
But they've means--for it was just that fact, I remember, that showed
Brookenham's getting the place wasn't a job. It was given, I mean, not
to his mere domestic need, but to his notorious efficiency. He has a
property--an ugly little place in Gloucestershire--which they sometimes
let. His elder brother has the better one, but they make up an income."

Mr. Longdon for an instant lost himself. "Yes, I remember--one heard of
those things at the time. And SHE must have had something."

"Yes indeed, she had something--and she always has her intense
cleverness. She knows thoroughly how. They do it tremendously well."

"Tremendously well," Mr. Longdon intelligently echoed. "But a house in
Buckingham Crescent, with the way they seem to have built through to all
sorts of other places--?"

"Oh they're all right," Vanderbank soothingly dropped.

"One likes to feel that of people with whom one has dined. There are
four children?" his friend went on.

"The older boy, whom you saw and who in his way is a wonder, the older
girl, whom you must see, and two youngsters, male and female, whom you
mustn't."