Page:The Awkward Age (New York, Harper and Brothers, 1899).djvu/216

THE AWKWARD AGE say to poor Harold, say, one of these days, to her yonnger brother and sister—that friends like you and me feel the importance of bestirring ourselves in time? Of course she's supposedly young, but she's really any age you like: your London world so fearfully batters and bruises them."

She had gone fast and far, but it had given Mr. Longdon time to feel himself well afloat. There were so many things in it all to take up that he laid his hand—of which, he was not unconscious, the feebleness exposed him—on the nearest. "Why, I'm sure her mother—after twenty years of it—is fresh enough."

"Fresh? You find Mrs. Brook fresh?"

The Duchess had a manner that, in its all-knowingness, rather humiliated than encouraged; but he was all the more resolute for being conscious of his own reserves. "It seems to me it's fresh to look about thirty."

"That indeed would be perfect. But she doesn't—she looks about three. She simply looks a baby."

"Oh Duchess, you're really too particular!" he returned, feeling that, as the trodden worm will turn, anxiety itself may sometimes tend to wit.

She met him in her own way. "I know what I mean. My niece is a person I call fresh. It's warranted, as they say in the shops. Besides," she went on, "if a married woman has been knocked about, that's only a part of her condition. Ella l'a bien voulu, and if you're married you're married; it's the smoke—or call it the soot!—of the fire. You know, yourself," she roundly pursued, "that Nanda's situation appalls you."

"Oh, "appalls'!" he restrictively murmured.

It even tried a little his companion's patience. "There you are, you English—you'll never face you're [sic] own music. It's amazing what you'd rather do with a thing—anything not to shoot or to make money with—than look at its meaning. If I wished to save the girl as you wish 206