Page:The Awkward Age (New York, Harper and Brothers, 1899).djvu/167

BOOK FOURTH: MR. CASHMORE amusement, to the expression of his old friend's face so much of the cause of it as had sprung from the deeply informed tone of Mrs. Brook's allusion. To what degree the speaker herself made the connection will never be known to history, nor whether, as she went on, she thought she bettered her case or simply lost her head. "The great thing for us is that we can never be for you quite like other ordinary people."

"And what's the great thing for me?"

"Oh, for you, there is nothing, I'm afraid, but small things—so small that they can scarcely be worth the trouble of your making them out. Our being so happy that you've come back to us—if only just for a glimpse and to leave us again, in no matter what horror, forever; our positive delight in your being exactly so different; the pleasure we have in talking about you, and shall still have—or indeed all the more—even if we've seen you only to lose you: whatever all this represents for ourselves, it's for none of us to pretend to say how much or how little you may pick out of it. And yet," Mrs. Brook wandered on, "however much we may disappoint you, some little spark of the past can't help being in us—for the past is the one thing beyond all spoiling: there it is, don't you think?—to speak for itself and, if need be, only of itself." She stopped a moment, but she appeared to have destroyed all power of speech in him, so that while she waited she had time for a fresh inspiration. It might perhaps frankly have been mentioned as on the whole her finest. "Don't you think it possible that if you once get the point of view of realizing that I know—?"

She held the note so long that he at last supplied a sound. "That you know what?"

"Why, that, compared with her, I'm a poor creeping thing. I mean"—she hastened to forestall any protest of mere decency that would spoil her idea—"that of course 157