Page:The Awkward Age (New York, Harper and Brothers, 1899).djvu/148

THE AWKWARD AGE for me, in the first place, of not being such an admirer of my wife."

Mrs. Brookenham took this up with interest. "No—you're right; she doesn't, as I do, see Lady Fanny, and that's a kind of mercy."

"There you are, then, you inconsistent creature," he cried with a laugh; "after all you do believe me. You recognize how benighted it would be for your daughter not to feel that Fanny's bad."

"You're too tiresome, my dear man," Mrs. Brook returned, "with your ridiculous simplifications. Fanny's not 'bad'; she's magnificently good—in the sense of being generous and simple and true, too adorably unaffected and without the least mesquinerie. She's a great calm silver statue."

Mr.Cashmore showed, on this, something of the strength that comes from the practice of public debate. "Then why are you glad that your daughter doesn't like her?"

Mrs. Brook smiled as with the sadness of having too much to triumph. "Because I'm not, like Fanny, without mesquinerie, I'm not generous and simple. I'm exaggeratedly anxious about Nanda. I care, in spite of myself, for what people may say. Your wife doesn't—she towers above them. I can be a shade less brave through the chance of my girl's not happening to feel her as the rest of us do."

Mr. Cashmore too heavily followed. "To 'feel' her?"

Mrs. Brook floated over. "There would be, in that case perhaps, something to hint to her not to shriek on the house-tops. When you say," she continued, "that one admits, as regards Fanny, anything wrong, you pervert dreadfully what one does freely grant—that she's a great glorious pagan. It's a real relief to know such a type—it's like a flash of insight into history. None the less, if you ask me why then it isn't all right for young things to 'shriek' as I say, I have my answer perfectly 138