Page:The Awkward Age (New York, Harper and Brothers, 1899).djvu/222

THE AWKWARD AGE, of these. Three months ago—it couldn't be any longer kept off—Nanda began definitely to 'sit'—to be there and look, by the tea-table, modestly and conveniently abstracted."

"I beg your pardon—I don't think she looks that, Duchess," Mr. Longdon lucidly broke in. How much she had carried him with her in spite of himself was betrayed by the very terms of his dissent. "I don't think it would strike any one that she looks 'convenient.'"

His companion, laughing, gave a shrug. "Try her and perhaps you'll find her so!" But his objection had none the less pulled her up a little. "I don't say she's a hypocrite, for it would certainly be less decent for her to giggle and wink. It's Mrs. Brook's theory moreover, isn't it? that she has, from five to seven at least, lowered the pitch. Doesn't she pretend that she bears in mind every moment the tiresome difference made by the presence of sweet virginal eighteen?"

"I haven't, I'm afraid, a notion of what she pretends!"

Mr. Longdon had spoken with a curtness to which his friend's particular manner of overlooking it only added significance. "They've become," she pursued, "superficial or insincere or frivolous, but at least they've become, with the way the drag's put on, quite as dull as other people."

He showed no sign of taking this up; instead of it he said abruptly: "But if it isn't Mr. Mitchett's own idea?—"

His fellow-visitor barely hesitated. "It would be his own if he were free—and it would be Lord Petherton's for him. I mean by his being free Nanda's becoming definitely lost to him. Then it would be impossible for Mrs. Brook to continue to persuade him, as she does now, that by a waiting game he'll come to his chance. His chance will cease to exist, and he wants so, poor darling, to marry. You've really now seen my niece," 212