Page:The Awkward Age (New York, Harper and Brothers, 1899).djvu/247

BOOK SIXTH: MRS. BROOK but it strikes me that, before I tell you, there's something I've a right to ask. Are you 'really' what they call thinking of my daughter?"

"Your asking," Vanderbank returned, "exactly shows the state of your knowledge of the matter. I don't quite see, moreover, why you speak as if I were paying an abrupt and unnatural attention. What have I done the last three months but talk to you about her? What have you done but talk to me about her? From the moment you first spoke to me—'monstrously,' I remember you called it—of the difference made in your social life by her finally established, her perpetual, her inexorable participation: from that moment what have we both done but put our heads together over the question of keeping the place tidy, as you called it—or as I called it, was it?—for the young female mind?"

Mrs. Brook faced serenely enough the directness of this challenge. "Well, what are you coming to? I spoke of the change in my life, of course; I happen to be so constituted that my life has something to do with my mind and my mind something to do with my talk. Good talk: you know—no one, dear Van, should know better—what part, for me, that plays. Therefore when one has deliberately to make one's talk bad—"

"'Bad'?" Vanderbank, in his amusement, fell back in his chair. "Dear Mrs. Brook, you're too delightful!"

"You know what I mean—stupid, flat, fourth-rate. When one has to take in sail to that degree—and for a perfectly outside reason—there's nothing strange in one's taking a friend sometimes into the confidence of one's irritation."

"Ah," Vanderbank protested, "you do yourself injustice. Irritation hasn't been, for you, the only consequence of the affair."

Mrs. Brook gloomily thought. "No, no—I've had my 237