Page:The Awkward Age (New York, Harper and Brothers, 1899).djvu/253

BOOK SIXTH: MRS. BROOK at Beccles—or whatever she puts in—not exactly fast and furious."

Vanderbank had the look of measuring what the girl might "put in." "The place will be quiet, of course, but when a person's so fond of a person—"

"As she is of him, you mean?"

He hesitated. "Yes. Then it's all right."

"She is fond of him, thank God!" said Mrs. Brook.

He was before her now with the air of a man who had suddenly determined on a great blind leap. "Do you know what he has done? He wants me so to marry her that he has proposed a definite basis."

Mrs. Brook got straight up. Proposed'? To her?"

"No, I don't think he has said a word to Nanda—in fact I'm sure that, very properly, he doesn't mean to. But he spoke to me on Sunday night at Mertle—I had a big talk with him there alone, very late, in the smokingroom." Mrs. Brook's stare was serious, and Vanderbank now went on as if the sound of his voice helped him to meet it. "We had things out very much and his kindness was extraordinary—he's the most beautiful old boy that ever lived. I don't know, now that I come to think of it, if I'm within my rights in telling you—and of course I shall immediately let him know that I have told you; but I feel I can't arrive at any respectable sort of attitude in the matter without taking you into my confidence—which is really what I came here to-day to do, though till this moment I've funked it."

It was either, as her friend chose to think it, an advantage or a drawback of intercourse with Mrs. Brook that her face being at any moment charged with the woe of the world, it was unavoidable to remain rather in the dark as to the effect of particular strokes. There was therefore something in Vanderbank's present study of the signs that showed he had had to learn to feel his way and had more or less mastered the trick. That she had 243