Page:The Awkward Age (New York, Harper and Brothers, 1899).djvu/269

BOOK SIXTH: MRS. BROOK back, had his eyes aloft and afar. "Oh, there are things in Nanda—!" The others exchanged a glance at this, while their companion added: "Little Aggie's really the sort of creature she would have liked to be able to be."

"Well," Mitchy said, "I should have adored her even if she had been able."

Mrs. Brook, for some minutes, had played no audible part, but the acute observer we are constantly taking for granted would perhaps have detected in her, as one of the effects of the special complexion, to-day, of Vanderbank's presence, a certain smothered irritation. "She couldn't possibly have been able," she now interposed, "with so loose—or rather, to express it more properly, with so perverse—a mother."

"And yet, my dear lady," Mitchy promptly reflected, "how, if, in little Aggie's case, the Duchess hasn't prevented—?"

Mrs. Brook was full of wisdom. "Well, it's a different thing. I'm not, as a mother—am I, Van?—bad enough. That's what's the matter with me. Aggie, don't you see? is the Duchess's morality, her virtue; which, by having it, that way, outside of you, as one may say, you can make a much better thing of. The child has been for Jane, I admit, a capital little subject, but Jane has kept her on hand and finished her like some wonderful piece of stitching. Oh, as work, it's of a soigné! There it is—to show. A woman like me has to be herself, poor thing, her virtue and her morality. What will you have? It's our lumbering English plan."

"So that her daughter," Mitchy sympathized, "can only, by the arrangement, hope to become at the best, her immorality and her vice?"

But Mrs. Brook, without an answer for the question, appeared suddenly to have plunged into a sea of thought. "The only way for Nanda to have been really nice—"

"Would have been for you to be like Jane?" 259