Page:The Awkward Age (New York, Harper and Brothers, 1899).djvu/265

BOOK SIXTH: MRS. BROOK same seat. "I've shown you already, you of course remember," Vanderbank presently said to him, "that I'm perfectly aware of how much better Mrs. Brook would like you for the position."

"He thinks I want him myself," Mrs. Brook blandly explained.

She was indeed, as they always thought her, "wonderful," but she was perhaps not even now so much so as Mitchy found himself able to be. "But how would you lose old Van—even at the worst?" he earnestly asked of her.

She just hesitated. "What do you mean by the worst?"

"Then even at the best," Mitchy smiled. "In the event of his falsifying your prediction; which, by-the-way, has the danger, hasn't it?—I mean for your intellectual credit—of making him, as we all used to be called by our nurse-maids, "contrairy [sic].'"

"'Oh, I've thought of that," Mrs. Brook returned. "But he won't do, on the whole, even for the sweetness of spiting me, what he won't want to do. I haven't said I should lose him," she went on; "that's only the view he himself takes—or, to do him perfect justice, the idea he candidly imputes to me; though without, I imagine—for I don't go so far as that—attributing to me anything so unutterably bête as a feeling of jealousy."

"You wouldn't dream of my supposing anything inept of you," Vanderbank said on this, "if you understood to the full how I keep on admiring you. Only what stupefies me a little," he continued, "is the extraordinary critical freedom—or we may call it if we like the high intellectual detachment—with which we discuss a question touching you, dear Mrs. Brook, so nearly and engaging so your most private and most sacred sentiments. What are we playing with, after all, but the idea of Nanda's happiness?" 255