Page:The Awkward Age (New York, Harper and Brothers, 1899).djvu/245

BOOK SIXTH: MRS. BROOK "We shall do that, I trust, whatever happens. She'll come up again—she'll remain, I feel, one of those enormous things that fate seems somehow to have given me as the occupation of my odd moments. I don't see," Mrs. Brook added, "what still keeps her on the edge, which isn't an inch wide."

Vanderbank looked, this time, as if he only tried to wonder. "Isn't it you?"

Mrs. Brook mused more deeply. "Sometimes I think so. But I don't know."

"Yes, how can you, of course, know, since she can't tell you?"

"Oh, if I depended on her telling—!" Mrs. Brook shook out, with this, a sofa cushion or two and sank into the corner she had arranged. The August afternoon was hot and the London air heavy; the room moreover, though agreeably bedimmed, gave out the staleness of the season's end. "If you hadn't come to-day," she went on, "you would have missed me till I don't know when, for we've let the Hovel again—wretchedly, but still we've let it—and I go down on Friday to see that it isn't too filthy. Edward, who's furious at what I've taken for it, had his idea that we should go there this year ourselves."

"And now"—Vanderbank took her up—"that fond fancy has become simply the ghost of a dead thought, a ghost that, in company with a thousand predecessors, haunts the house in the twilight and pops at you out of odd corners."

"Oh, Edward's dead thoughts are indeed a cheerful company and worthy of the perpetual mental mourning we seem to go about in. They're worse than the relations we're always losing without seeming to have any fewer, and I expect every day to hear that the Morning Post regrets to have to announce in that line too some new bereavement. The apparitions following the deaths of so many thoughts are particularly awful in the twilight, so 235