Page:The Awkward Age (New York, Harper and Brothers, 1899).djvu/194

THE AWKWARD AGE for you, and came this way on an indication of your mother's."

"And did she ask that if you should find me with Mr. Van you would make him come to her?"

Mr. Longdon replied to this with some delay, but without movement. "How could she have supposed he was here?"

"Since he had not yet been to the house? Oh, it has always been a wonder to me, the things that mamma supposes! I see she asked you," Nanda observed.

At this her old friend turned to her. "But it wasn't because of that I got rid of him."

Nanda hesitated. "No—you don't mind everything mamma says."

"I don't mind 'everything' anybody says: not even, my dear, when the person's you."

Again she waited an instant. "Not even when it's Mr. Van?"

Mr. Longdon candidly considered. "Oh, I take him up on all sorts of things."

"That shows then the importance they have for you. Is he like his grandmother?" the girl pursued. Then as her companion looked vague: "Wasn't it his grandmother too you knew?"

He had an extraordinary smile. "His mother." She exclaimed, coloring, on her mistake, and he added: "I'm not so bad as that. But you're none of you like them."

"Wasn't she pretty?" Nanda inquired.

"Very handsome. But it makes no difference. She herself, to-day, wouldn't know him."

She gave a small gasp. "His own mother wouldn't—?"

His head-shake just failed of sharpness. "No, nor he her. There's a link missing." Then as if, after all, she might take him too seriously, "Of course it's I," he more gently moralized, "who have lost the link in my sleep. I've slept half the century—I'm Rip Van Winkle." 184