Page:The Awkward Age (New York, Harper and Brothers, 1899).djvu/142

THE AWKWARD AGE paper that he slipped with slow firmness into the pocket of his waistcoat, rubbing it gently, in its passage, against the delicately buff-colored duck of which that garment was composed. "So quite too awfully kind of you that I really don't know what to say"—there was a marked recall, in the manner of this speech, of the sweetness of his mother's droop and the tenderness of her wail. It was as if he had been moved for the moment to moralize, but the eyes he raised to his benefactor had the oddest effect of marking that personage himself as the source of the lesson.

Mr. Cashmore, who would have been very red-headed if he had not been very bald, showed a single eye-glass and a long upper lip; he was large and jaunty, with little petulant movements and intense ejaculations that were not in the line of his type. "You may say anything you like if you don't say you'll repay it. That's always nonsense—I hate it."

Harold remained sad, but showed himself really superior. "Then I won't say it." Pensively, a minute, he appeared to figure the words, in their absurdity, on the lips of some young man not, like himself, tactful. "I know just what you mean."

"But I think, you know, that you ought to tell your father," Mr. Cashmore said.

"Tell him I've borrowed of you?"

Mr. Cashmore good-humoredly demurred. "It would serve me right—it's so shocking my having listened to you. Tell him, certainly," he went on after an instant. "But what I mean is that if you're in such straits you should speak to him like a man."

Harold smiled at the innocence of a friend who could suppose him not to have exhausted that resource. "I'm always speaking to him like a man, and that's just what puts him so awfully out. He denies to my face that I am one. One would suppose, to hear him, not only that 132