Page:The Awkward Age (New York, Harper and Brothers, 1899).djvu/213

BOOK FIFTH: THE DUCHESS "in a certain amount of intelligent confidence. Really nice men are steadied by the sense of your having had it. But I wouldn't," she added gaily, "trust him all round!"

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Many things, at Mertle, were strange for her interlocutor, but nothing perhaps as yet had been so strange as the sight of this arrangement for little Aggie's protection—an arrangement made in the interest of her remaining as a young person of her age and her monde, as her aunt would have said, should remain. The strangest part of this impression too was that the provision might really have its happy side and his lordship really understand better than any one else his noble friend's whole theory of perils and precautions. The child herself, the spectator of the incident was sure enough, understood nothing, but the understandings that surrounded her, filling all the air, made it a heavier compound to breathe than any Mr. Longdon had yet tasted. This heaviness had grown, for him, through the long, sweet summer day, and there was something in his at last finding himself ensconced with the Duchess that made it supremely oppressive. The contact was one that, none the less, he would not have availed himself of a decent pretext to avoid. With so many fine mysteries playing about him, there was relief, at the point he had reached, rather than alarm, in the thought of knowing the worst; which it pressed upon him, somehow, that the Duchess must not only supremely know, but must, in any relation, most naturally communicate. It fluttered him rather that a person who had an understanding with Lord Petherton should so single him out as to wish for one also with himself: such a person must either have great variety of mind or have a 203