Page:The Awkward Age (New York, Harper and Brothers, 1899).djvu/215

BOOK FIFTH: THE DUCHESS instant perhaps meditated. "It's probably not in my interest to say that—I should give you too easy a retort. It would strike any one as quite as much your business as mine."

"Well, it ought to be somebody's, you know. One would suppose it to be her mother's—her father's; but in this country the parents are even more emancipated than the children. Suppose, really, since it appears to be nobody's affair, that you and I do make it ours. We needn't either of us," she continued, "be concerned for the other's reasons, though I'm perfectly ready, I assure you, to put my cards on the table. You've your feelings—we know they're beautiful. I, on my side, have mine—for which I don't pretend anything but that they're strong. They can dispense with being beautiful when they're so perfectly settled. Besides, I may mention, they're rather nice than otherwise. Edward and I have a cousinage, though for all he does to keep it up—! If he leaves his children to play in the street, I take it seriously enough to make an occasional dash for them before they're run over. And I want for Nanda simply the man she herself wants—it isn't as if I wanted for her a dwarf or a hunchback or a coureur or a drunkard. Vanderbank's a man whom any woman, don't you think? might be—whom more than one woman is—glad of for herself: beau comme le jour, awfully conceited and awfully patronizing, but clever and successful and yet liked, and without, so far as I know, any of the terrific appendages which, in this country, so often diminish the value of even the pleasantest people. He hasn't five horrible unmarried sisters for his wife to have always on a visit. The way your women don't marry is the ruin, here, of society, and I've been assured in good quarters—though I don't know so much about that—the ruin also of conversation and of literature. Isn't it precisely just a little to keep Nanda herself from becoming that kind of appendage— 205