Page:The Awkward Age (New York, Harper and Brothers, 1899).djvu/23

BOOK FIRST: LADY JULIA "Well, she doesn't do it always," Vanderbank laughed, "and it's nothing, moreover, to what some people are called. Why, there was a fellow there—" He pulled up, however, and, thinking better of it, selected another instance. "The Duchess—weren't you introduced to the Duchess?—never calls me anything but 'Vanderbank' unless she calls me 'caro mio.' It wouldn't have taken much to make her appeal to you with an 'I say, Longdon!' I can quite hear her."

Mr. Longdon, focussing the effect of the sketch, pointed its moral with an indulgent: "Oh well, a foreign duchess!" He could make his distinctions.

"Yes, she's invidiously, cruelly foreign," Vanderbank concurred: "I've never indeed seen a woman avail herself so cleverly, to make up for the obloquy of that state, of the benefits and immunities it brings with it. She has bloomed in the hot-house of her widowhood—she's a Neapolitan hatched by an incubator."

"A Neapolitan?"—Mr. Longdon, civilly, seemed to wish he had only known it.

"Her husband was one; but I believe that dukes at Naples are as thick as princes at Petersburg. He's dead, at any rate, poor man, and she has come back here to live."

"Gloomily, I should think—after Naples?" Mr. Longdon threw out.

"Oh, it would take more than even a Neapolitan past—! However," the young man added, catching himself up, "she lives not in what is behind her, but in what is before—she lives in her precious little Aggie."

"Little Aggie?" Mr. Longdon took a cautious interest.

"I don't take a liberty there," Vanderbank smiled. "I speak only of the young Agnesina, a little girl, the Duchess's niece, or rather, I believe, her husband's, whom she has adopted—in the place of a daughter early lost—and has brought to England to marry." 13