Page:The Awkward Age (New York, Harper and Brothers, 1899).djvu/263

BOOK SIXTH: MRS. BROOK my finding myself, for instance, in you and Mrs. Brook? We see ourselves reflected—we're conscious of the charming whole. I thank you," he pursued after an instant to Mrs. Brook—"I thank you for your sincerity."

It was a business sometimes really to hold her eyes, but they had, it must be said for her, their steady moments. She exchanged with Vanderbank a somewhat remarkable look, then, with an art of her own, broke short off without appearing to drop him. "The thing is, don't you think?"—she appealed to Mitchy—"for us not to be so awfully clever as to make it believed that we can never be simple. We mustn't see too tremendous things—even in each other." She quite lost patience with the danger she glanced at. "We can be simple!"

"We can, by God!" Mitchy laughed.

"Well, we are now—and it's a great comfort to have it settled," said Vanderbank.

"Then you see," Mrs. Brook returned, "what a mistake you would make to see abysses of subtlety in my having been merely natural."

"We can be natural," Mitchy declared.

"We can, by God!" Vanderbank laughed.

Mrs. Brook had turned to Mitchy. "I just wanted you to know. So I spoke. It's not more complicated than that. As for why I wanted you to know—"

"What better reason could there be," Mitchy interrupted, "than your being filled to the finger-tips with the sense of how I would want it myself, and of the misery, the absolute pathos, of my being left out? Fancy, my dear chap"—he had only to put it to Van—"my not knowing!"

Vanderbank evidently couldn't fancy it, but he said quietly enough: "I should probably have told you myself."

"Well, what's the difference?"

"Oh, there is a difference," Mrs. Brook loyally said. 253