Page:The Awkward Age (New York, Harper and Brothers, 1899).djvu/18

THE AWKWARD AGE literally dug up from a long sleep. I assure you there have!"—he really pressed the point.

Vanderbank wondered a moment what things in particular these might be; he found himself wanting to get at everything his visitor represented, to enter into his consciousness and be, as it were, on his side. He glanced, with an intention freely sarcastic, at an easy possibility. "The extraordinary vitality of Brookenham?"

Mr. Longdon, with the nippers in place again, fixed on him a gravity that failed to prevent his discovering in the eyes behind them a shy reflection of his irony. "Oh, Brookenham! You must tell me all about Brookenham."

"I see that's not what you mean."

Mr. Longdon forbore to deny it. "I wonder if you'll understand what I mean." Vanderbank bristled with the wish to be put to the test, but was checked before he could say so. "And what's his place—Brookenham's?"

"Oh, Rivers and Lakes—an awfully good thing. He got it last year."

Mr. Longdon—but not too grossly—wondered. "How did he get it?"

Vanderbank laughed. "Well, she got it."

His friend remained grave. "And about how much now—?"

"Oh, twelve hundred—and lots of allowances and boats and things. To do the work," Vanderbank, still with a certain levity, exclaimed.

"And what is the work?"

The young man hesitated. "Ask him. He'll like to tell you."

"Yet he seemed to have but little to say." Mr. Longdon exactly measured it again.

"Ah, not about that. Try him."

He looked more sharply at his host, as if vaguely suspicious of a trap; then, not less vaguely, he sighed. 8