Page:The Awkward Age (New York, Harper and Brothers, 1899).djvu/160

THE AWKWARD AGE He might have known them, something suddenly fixed in his face appeared to say, but they were not what was, on this speech of hers, most immediately present to him. "That, for instance, is the tone not to take with him."

"There you are!" she sighed with discouragement. "Well, only tell me." Then as he said nothing: "I must be more like mamma?"

His smile confessed to his feeling an awkwardness. "You're perhaps not quite enough like her."

"Oh, I know that if he deplores me as I am now, she would have done so quite as much, in fact probably, as seeing it nearer, a good deal more. She would have despised me even more than he. But if it's a question," Mrs. Brook went on, "of not saying what mamma wouldn't, how can I know, don't you see? what she would have said?" Mrs. Brook became as wonderful as if she saw in her friend's face some admiring reflection of the fine freedom of mind that—in such a connection quite as much as in any other—she could always show. "Of course I revere mamma just as much as he does, and there was everything in her to revere. But she was none the less, in every way, a charming woman too, and I don't know, after all, do I? what even she—in their peculiar relation—may not have said to him."

Vanderbank's laugh came back. "Very good—very good. I return to my first idea. Try with him whatever comes into your head. You're a woman of genius, after all, and genius mostly justifies itself. To make you right," he went on pleasantly and inexorably, "might perhaps be to make you wrong. Since you have so great a charm, trust it not at all or all in all. That, I dare say, is all you can do. Therefore—yes—be yourself."

These remarks were followed on either side by the repetition of a somewhat intenser mutual gaze, though indeed the speaker's eyes had more the air of meeting his friend's 150