Page:The Awkward Age (New York, Harper and Brothers, 1899).djvu/230

THE AWKWARD AGE had not his eyes on Vanderbank, who for a minute said nothing, and he presently went on: "To see it, and not to want to try to help—well, I can't do that." Vanderbank still neither spoke nor moved, remained as if he might interrupt something of high importance to him, and his friend, passing along the opposite edge of the table, continued to produce in the stillness, without the cue, the small click of the ivory. "How long—if you don't mind my asking—have you known it?"

Even for this, at first, Vanderbank had no answer—none but to rise from his place, come down to the floor and, standing there, look at Mr. Longdon across the table. He was serious now, but without being solemn. "How can one tell? One can never be sure. A man may fancy, may wonder, but with a girl, a person so much younger than himself and so much more helpless, he feels a—what shall I call it?"

"A delicacy?" Mr. Longdon suggested.

"It may be that; the name doesn't matter; at all events he's embarrassed. He wants not to be an ass on the one side, and yet not some other kind of brute on the other."

Mr. Longdon listened with consideration—with a beautiful little air indeed of being, in his all but finally contracted state, earnestly open to information on such points from a magnificent young man. "He doesn't want, you mean, to be fatuous?—and he doesn't want to be cruel?"

Vanderbank, visibly preoccupied, produced a faint, kind smile. "Oh, you know!"

"I? I should know less than any one."

Mr. Longdon had turned away from the table on this, and the eyes of his companion, who after an instant had caught his meaning, watched him move along the room and approach another part of the divan. The consequence of the passage was that Vanderbank's only rejoinder was presently to say: "I can't tell you how long 220