Page:The Awkward Age (New York, Harper and Brothers, 1899).djvu/111

BOOK THIRD: MR. LONGDON His companion, as if to look at him with a due appreciation of this, stopped swinging the nippers and put them on. "You people here have a pleasant way—"

"Oh, we have!"—Mitchy, taking him up, was gaily emphatic. He began, however, already to perceive the mystification which in this case was to be his happy effect.

"Mr.Vanderbank," his victim remarked, with perhaps a shade more of reserve, "has told me a good deal about you." Then as if, in a finer manner, to keep the talk off themselves: "He knows a great many ladies."

"Oh yes, poor chap, he can't help it. He finds a lady wherever he turns."

The stranger took this in, but seemed a little to challenge it. "Well, that's reassuring, if one sometimes fancies there are fewer."

"Fewer than there used to be?—I see what you mean," said Mitchy. "But if it has struck you so, that's awfully interesting." He glared and grinned and mused. "I wonder."

"Well, we shall see." His friend seemed to wish not to dogmatize.

"Shall we?" Mitchy considered it again in its high suggestive light. "You will—but how shall I?" Then he caught himself up with a blush. "What a beastly thing to say—as if it were mere years that make you see it!"

His companion, this time, gave way to the joke. "What else can it be—if I've thought so?"

"Why, it's the facts themselves, and the fine taste, and above all something qui ne court pas les rues, an approach to some experience of what a lady is." The young man's acute reflection appeared suddenly to flower into a vision of opportunity that swept everything else away. "Excuse my insisting on your time of life—but you have seen some?" The question was of such interest that he had already begun to follow it. "Oh, the charm of talk 101