Page:The Awkward Age (New York, Harper and Brothers, 1899).djvu/159

BOOK FOURTH: MR. CASHMORE would like to say is: 'Be somebody else—that's your only chance.' Well, I'll try—I'll try."

He laughed again, shaking his head. "Don't— don't."

"You mean it's too hopeless? There's no way of effacing the bad impression or of starting a good one?" On this, with a drop of his mirth, he met her eyes, and for an instant, through the superficial levity of their talk, they might have appeared to sound each other. It lasted till Mrs. Brook went on: "I should really like not to lose him."

Vanderbank hesitated, but at last he said: "I think you won't lose him."

"Do you mean you'll help me. Van—you will?" Her voice had at moments the most touching tones of any in England, and, humble, helpless, affectionate, she spoke with a familiarity of friendship. "It's for the sense of the link with mamma," she explained. "He's simply full of her."

"Oh, I know. He's prodigious."

"He has told you more—he comes back to it?" Mrs. Brook eagerly asked.

"Well," the young man replied a trifle evasively, "we've had a great deal of talk, and he's the jolliest old boy possible, and in short I like him."

"I see," said Mrs. Brook blandly, "and he likes you, in return, as much as he despises me. That makes it all right—makes me somehow so happy for you. There's something in him—what is it?—that suggests the oncle d'Amérique, the eccentric benefactor, the fairy godmother. He's a little of an old woman—but all the better for it." She hung fire but an instant before she pursued: "What can we make him do for you?"

Vanderbank, at this, was very blank. "Do for me?"

"How can any one love you," she asked, "without wanting to show it in some way? You know all the ways, dear Van," she breathed, "in which I want to show it." 149