Page:The Awkward Age (New York, Harper and Brothers, 1899).djvu/268

THE AWKWARD AGE The two again, as if they understood each other, gazed in a unity of interest at their companion, who sustained it with an air clearly intended as the happy mean between embarrassment and triumph. Then Mrs. Brook showed she liked the phrase. "The sacred terror! Yes, one feels it. It is that."

"The finest case of it," Mitchy pursued, "that I've ever met. So my moral's sufficiently pointed."

"Oh, I don't think it can be said to be that," Vanderbank returned, "till you've put the whole thing into a box by doing for Nanda what she does most want you to do."

Mitchy caught on without a shade of wonder. "Oh, by proposing to the Duchess for little Aggie?" He took but an instant to turn it over. "Well, I would propose, to please Nanda. Only I've never yet quite made out the reason of her wish."

"The reason is largely," his friend answered, "that, being very fond of Aggie, and in fact extremely admiring her, she wants to do something good for her and to keep her from anything bad. Don't you know—it's too charming—she regularly believes in her?"

Mitchy, with all his recognition, vibrated to the touch. "Isn't it too charming?"

"Well then," Vanderbank went on, "she secures for her friend a phœnix like you, and secures for you a phœnix like her friend. It's hard to say for which of you she desires most to do the handsome thing. She loves you both, in short"—he followed it up—"though perhaps, when one thinks of it, the price she puts on you, Mitchy, in the arrangement, is a little the higher. Awfully fine, at any rate—and yet awfully odd too—her feeling for Aggie's type, which is divided by such abysses from her own."

"Ah," laughed Mitchy, "but think then of her feeling for mine!"

Vanderbank, still more at his ease now and with his head 258