Page:The Awkward Age (New York, Harper and Brothers, 1899).djvu/189

BOOK FIFTH: THE DUCHESS "Yes—though not me quite, altogether. But the hope he originally had."

"He gives up quickly—in three months!"

"Oh, these three months," she answered, "have been a long time: the fullest, the most important, for what has happened in them, of my life." She still poked at the ground; then she added: "And all thanks to you."

"To me?"—Vanderbank couldn't fancy.

"Why, for what we were speaking of just now—my being now so in everything and squeezing up and down no matter whose staircase. Isn't it one crowded hour of glorious life?" she asked. "What preceded it was an age, no doubt—but an age without a name."

Vanderbank watched her a little in silence, then spoke quite beside the question. "It's astonishing how at moments you remind me of your mother!"

At this she got up. "Ah, there it is! It's what I shall never shake off. That, I imagine, is what Mr. Longdon feels."

Both on their feet now, as if ready for the others, they yet—and even a trifle awkwardly—lingered. It might in fact have appeared to a spectator that some climax had come, on the young man's part, to some state of irresolution as to the utterance of something. What were the words repeatedly on his lips, yet repeatedly not sounded? It would have struck our observer that they were probably not those his lips even now actually formed. "Doesn't he perhaps talk to you too much about yourself?"

Nanda gave him a dim smile, and he might indeed then have exclaimed on a certain resemblance, a resemblance of expression that had nothing to do with form. It would not have been diminished for him, moreover, by her successful suppression of every sign that she felt his inquiry a little of a snub. The recall he had previously mentioned could, however, as she answered him, only have been brushed away by a supervening sense of his 179