Page:The Awkward Age (New York, Harper and Brothers, 1899).djvu/267

BOOK SIXTH: MRS. BROOK Mrs. Brook had followed Mitchy with marked admiration, but she gave, on this, at Van, a glance that was like the toss of a blossom from the same branch. "Oh then, shall I just go on with you both? That will be joy!" She had, however, the next thing, a sudden drop, which shaded the picture. "You're so divine, Mitchy, that how can you not, in the long-run, break any woman down?"

It was not as if Mitchy was struck—it was only that he was courteous. "What do you call the long-run? Taking about till I'm eighty?"

"Ah, your genius is of a kind to which middle life will be particularly favorable. You'll reap then, somehow, one feels, everything you've sown."

Mitchy still accepted the prophecy only to control it. "Do you call eighty middle life? Why, my moral beauty, my dear woman—if that's what you mean by my genius—is precisely my curse. What on earth is left for a man just rotten with goodness! It renders necessary the kind of liking that renders unnecessary anything else."

"Now that is cheap paradox!" Vanderbank patiently sighed. "You're down for a fine."

It was with less of the patience perhaps that Mrs. Brook took this up. "Yes, on that we are stiff. Five pounds, please."

Mitchy drew out his pocket-book even though he explained. "What I mean is that I don't give out the great thing." With which he produced a crisp bank-note.

"Don't you?" asked Vanderbank, who, having taken it from him to hand to Mrs. Brook, held it a moment, delicately, to accentuate the doubt.

"The great thing's the sacred terror. It's you who give that out."

"Oh!"—and Vanderbank laid the money on the small stand at Mrs. Brook's elbow.

"Ain't I right, Mrs. Brook?—doesn't he, tremendously, and isn't that, more than anything else, what does it?" 257