Page:The Awkward Age (New York, Harper and Brothers, 1899).djvu/26

THE AWKWARD AGE but it would have been more to the point to say the grandmothers." He stopped before the lounge, then nodded at the image of Nanda. "I knew hers. She put it at something less."

Vanderbank rather failed to understand. "The old lady? Put what?"

Mr. Longdon's face, for a moment, showed him as feeling his way. "I'm speaking of Mrs. Brookenham. She spoke of her daughter as only sixteen."

His companion's amusement at the tone of this broke out. "She usually does! She has done so, I think, for the last year or two."

Mr. Longdon dropped upon the lounge as if with the weight of something sudden and fresh; then, from where he sat, with a sharp little movement, tossed into the fire the end of his cigarette. Vanderbank offered him another, a second, and as he accepted it and took a light he said: "I don't know what you're doing with me—I never, at home, smoke so much!" But he puffed away and, seated so near him, laid his hand on Vanderbank's arm as if to help himself to utter something that was too delicate not to be guarded and yet too important not to be risked. "Now that's the sort of thing I did mean—as one of my impressions." Vanderbank continued at a loss, and he went on: "I refer—if you don't mind my saying so—to what you said just now."

Vanderbank was conscious of a deep desire to draw from him whatever might come; so sensible was it somehow that whatever in him was good was also thoroughly personal. But our young friend had to think a minute. "I see, I see. Nothing is more probable than that I've said something nasty; but which of my particular horrors—?"

"Well, then, your conveying that she makes her daughter out younger—"

"To make herself out the same?"—Vanderbank took 16