Page:The Awkward Age (New York, Harper and Brothers, 1899).djvu/248

THE AWKWARD AGE calmness: the calmness of deep despair. I've seemed to see everything go."

"Oh, how can you say that," her visitor demanded, "when just what we've most been agreed upon so often is the practical impossibility of making any change? Hasn't it seemed as if we really can't overcome conversational habits so thoroughly formed?"

Again Mrs. Brook reflected. "As if our way of looking at things were too serious to be trifled with. I don't know—I think it's only you who have denied our sacrifices, our compromises and concessions. I myself have constantly felt smothered in them. But there it is," she impatiently went on. "What I don't admit is that you've given me ground to take for a proof of your 'intentions'—to use the odious term—your association with me on behalf of the preposterous fiction, as it after all is, of Nanda's blankness of mind."

Vanderbank's head, in his chair, was thrown back; his eyes ranged over the top of the room. "There never has been any mystery about my thinking her—all in her own way—the nicest girl in London. She is."

His companion was silent a little. "She is, by all means. Well," she then added, "so far as I may have been alive to the fact of any one's thinking her so, it's not out of place I should mention to you the difference made in my appreciation of it by our delightful little stay at Mertle. My views of Nanda," said Mrs. Brook, "have somehow gone up."

Vanderbank was prompt to show how he could understand it. "So that you wouldn't consider even Mitchy now?"

But his friend took no notice of the question. "The way Mr. Longdon distinguishes her is quite the sort of thing that gives a girl, as Harold says, a 'leg up.' It's awfully curious and has made me think: he isn't anything whatever, as London estimates go, in himself—so 238