Page:The Awkward Age (New York, Harper and Brothers, 1899).djvu/273

BOOK SIXTH: MRS. BROOK when it is only one of them who looks at the other. Nanda, gazing vaguely about and not seeking a seat, slowly drew off her gloves while her mother's sad eyes considered her from top to toe. "Tea's gone," Mrs. Brook then said as if there were something in the loss peculiarly irretrievable. "But I suppose," she added, "he gave you all you want."

"Oh dear yes, thank you—I've had lots."

Nanda hovered there slim and charming, feathered and ribboned, dressed in thin, fresh fabrics and faint colors, with something in the effect of it all to which the sweeter, deeper melancholy in her mother's eyes seemed happily to testify. "Just turn round, dear." The girl immediately obeyed, and Mrs. Brook once more took everything in. "The back's best—only she didn't do what she said she would. How they do lie!" she gently quavered.

"Yes, but we lie so to them." Nanda had swung round again, producing evidently on her mother's part, by the admirable "hang" of her light skirts, a still deeper peace. "Do you mean the middle fold?—I knew she wouldn't. I don't want my back to be best—I don't walk backward."

"Yes," Mrs. Brook resignedly mused; "you dress for yourself."

"Oh, how can you say that," the girl asked, "when I never stick in a pin but what I think of you?"

"Well," Mrs. Brook moralized, "one must always, I consider, think, as a sort of point de repère, of some one good person. Only it's best if it's a person one's afraid of. You do very well, but I'm not enough. What one really requires is a kind of salutary terror. I never stick in a pin without thinking of your cousin Jane. What is it that some one quotes somewhere about some one's having said that 'Our antagonist is our helper—he prevents our being superficial'? The extent to which, with my poor clothes, the Duchess prevents me—!" It was a 263