Page:The Awkward Age (New York, Harper and Brothers, 1899).djvu/127

BOOK THIRD: MR. LONGDON her as a way of alluding to something you guess she must have told me?"

"That I've always supposed I make your flesh creep? Yes," Mitchy admitted; "I see that she must have said to you: 'Be nice to him, to show him it isn't quite so bad as that!' So you are nice—so you always will be nice. But I adore you, all the same, without illusions."

She had opened, at one of the tables, unperceivingly, a big volume, of which she turned the leaves. "Don't 'adore' a girl, Mr. Mitchy—just help her. That's more to the purpose."

"Help you?" he cried. "You bring tears to my eyes!"

"Can't a girl have friends?" she went on. "I never heard of anything so idiotic." Giving him, however, no chance to take her up on this, she made a quick transition. "Mother didn't come because she wants me now, as she says, more to share her own life."

Mitchy looked at it. "But is this the way for her to share yours?"

"Ah, that's another matter—about which you must talk to her. She wants me not, any more, to see only with her eyes. She's throwing me into the world."

Mitchy had listened with the liveliest interest, but he presently broke into a laugh. "What a good thing, then, that I'm there to catch you!"

Without—it might have been seen—having gather the smallest impression of what they enclosed, she carefully drew together again the covers of her folio. There was deliberation in her movements. "I shall always be glad when you're there. But where do you suppose they've gone?" Her eyes were on what was visible of the other room, from which there arrived no sound of voices.

"They are there," said Mitchy, "but simply looking unutterable things about you. The impression's too 117