Page:The Awkward Age (New York, Harper and Brothers, 1899).djvu/113

BOOK THIRD: MR. LONGDON Old Van's possible confidant, instead of immediately answering, again assumed the pince-nez. "Is that what you call him?"

"In general, I think—for shortness."

"And also"—the speaker hesitated—"for esteem?"

Mitchy laughed out. "For veneration! Our disrespects, I think, are all tender, and we wouldn't for the world do to a person we don't like anything so nice as to call him, or even to call her, don't you know—?"

His questioner had quickly looked as if he knew. "Something pleasant and vulgar?"

Mitchy's gaiety deepened. "That discrimination is our only austerity. You must fall in."

"Then what will you call me?"

"What can we?" After which, sustainingly, "I'm 'Mitchy,'" our friend revealed.

His interlocutor looked sliglitly queer. "I don't think I can quite begin. I'm Mr. Longdon," he almost blushed to articulate.

"Absolutely and essentially—that's exactly what I recognize. I defy any one to see you," Mitchy declared, "as anything else, and on that footing you'll be, among us, unique."

Mr. Longdon appeared to accept his prospect of isolation with a certain gravity. "I gather from you—I've gathered indeed from Mr. Vanderbank—that you're a little sort of a set that hang very much together."

"Oh yes; not a formal association nor a secret society—still less a 'dangerous gang' or an organization for any definite end. We're simply a collection of natural affinities," Mitchy explained; "meeting perhaps principally in Mrs. Brook's drawing-room—though sometimes also in old Van's, as you see, sometimes even in mine—and governed at any rate everywhere by Mrs. Brook, in our mysterious ebbs and flows, very much as the tides are governed by the moon. As I say," Mitchy pursued, "you 103