Page:The Awkward Age (New York, Harper and Brothers, 1899).djvu/165

BOOK FOURTH: MR. CASHMORE takes in more. But that's what you all do," he rather helplessly sighed. "You're very, very wonderful!"

She met him with an almost extravagant eagerness that the meeting should be just where he wished. "I don't take in everything, but I take in all I can. That's a great affair in London to-day, and I often feel as if I were a circus-woman, in pink tights and no particular skirts, riding half a dozen horses at once. We're all in the troupe now, I suppose," she smiled, "and we must travel with the show. But when you say we're different," she added, "think, after all, of mamma."

Mr. Longdon stared. "It's from her you are different."

"Ah, but she had an awfully fine mind. We're not cleverer than she."

His conscious, honest eyes looked away an instant. "It's perhaps enough, for the present, that you're cleverer than I! I was very glad, the other day," he continued, "to make the acquaintance of your daughter. I hoped I should find her with you."

If Mrs. Brook cast about, it was but for a few seconds. "If she had known you were coming, she would certainly have been here. She wanted so to please you." Then, as her visitor took no further notice of this speech than to ask if Nanda were out of the house, she had to admit it as an aggravation of failure; but she pursued in the next breath: "Of coarse you won't care, but she raves about you."

He appeared indeed at first not to care. "Isn't she eighteen?"—it was oddly abrupt.

"I have to think. Wouldn't it be nearer twenty?" Mrs. Brook audaciously returned. Then she tried again. "She told me all about your interview. I staid away on purpose—I had my idea."

"And what was your idea?"

"I thought she would remind you more of mamma if 155