Page:The Awkward Age (New York, Harper and Brothers, 1899).djvu/207

BOOK FIFTH: THE DUCHESS been reading." Then again to her fellow-visitor, as arrested by this very question: "Caro signore, have you a possible book?"

Little Aggie had got straight up and was holding out her volume, which Mr. Longdon, all courtesy for her, glanced at. "Stories from English History. Oh!"

His ejaculation, though vague, was not such as to prevent the girl from venturing gently: "Have you read it?"

Mr. Longdon, receiving her pure little smile, showed he felt that he had never so taken her in as at this moment, and also that she was a person with whom he should surely get on. "I think I must have."

Little Aggie was still more encouraged, but not to the point of keeping anything back. "It hasn't any author. It's anonymous."

The Duchess borrowed, for another question to Mr. Longdon, not a little of her gravity. "Is it all right?"

"I don't know"—his answer was to Aggie. "There have been some horrid things in English history."

"Oh, horrid—haven't there?" Aggie, whose speech had the prettiest, faintest foreignness, sweetly and eagerly quavered.

"Well, darling, Mr. Longdon will recommend to you some nice historical work—for we love history, don't we?—that leaves the horrors out. We like to know," the Duchess explained to the authority she invoked, "the cheerful, happy, right hings. There are so many, after all, and this is the place to remember them. A tantôt."

As she passed into the house by the nearest of the long windows that stood open Mr. Longdon placed himself beside her little charge, whom he treated, for the next ten minutes, with an exquisite courtesy. A person who knew him well would, if present at the scene, have found occasion in it to be freshly aware that he was, in his quiet way, master of two distinct kinds of urbanity, the 197