Page:The Awkward Age (New York, Harper and Brothers, 1899).djvu/166

THE AWKWARD AGE I wasn't there. But she's a little person who sees. Perhaps you didn't think it, but she knew."

"And what did she know?" asked Mr. Longdon, who was unable, however, to keep from his tone a certain coldness which really deprived the question of its proper curiosity.

Mrs. Brook just showed the chill of it, but she had always her courage. "Why, that you don't like her." She had the courage of carrying off as well as of backing out. "She too has her little place with the circus—it's the way we earn our living."

Mr. Longdon said nothing for a moment, and when he at last spoke it was almost with an air of contradiction. "She's your mother to the life."

His hostess, for three seconds, looked at him hard. "Ah, but with such differences! You'll lose it," she added with a head-shake of pity.

He had his eyes only on Vanderbank. "'Well, my losses are my own affair." Then his eyes came back. "Did she tell you I didn't like her?"

The indulgence in Mrs. Brook's view of his simplicity was marked. "You thought you succeeded so in hiding it? No matter—she bears up. I think she really feels a great deal as I do—that it's no matter how many of us you hate if you'll only go on feeling as you do about mamma. To show us that—that's what we want."

Nothing could have expressed more the balm of reassurance, but the mild drops fell short of the spot to which they were directed. "'Show' you?"

Oh, how he had sounded the word! "I see—you don't show. That's just what Nanda saw you thought! But you can't keep us from knowing it—can't keep it in fact, I think, from affecting your own behavior. You'd be much worse to us if it wasn't for the still warm ashes of your old passion." It was an immense pity that Vanderbank was at this moment too far off to fit, for his 156