Page:The Awkward Age (New York, Harper and Brothers, 1899).djvu/274

THE AWKWARD AGE measure Mrs. Brook could give only by the general soft wail of her submission to fate.

"Yes, the Duchess isn't a woman, is she? She's a standard."

The speech had for Nanda's companion, however, no effect of pleasantry or irony, and it was a mark of the special intercourse of these good friends that though they had for each other, in manner and tone, such a fund of consideration as might almost have given it the stamp of diplomacy, there was yet in it also something of that economy of expression which is the result of a common experience. The recurrence of opportunity to observe them together would have taught a spectator that—on Mrs. Brook's side, doubtless, more particularly—their relation was governed by two or three remarkably established and, as might have been said, refined laws, the spirit of which was to guard against the vulgarity so often coming to the surface between parent and child. That they were as good friends as if Nanda had not been her daughter was a truth that no passage between them might fail in one way or another to illustrate. Nanda had gathered up, for that matter, early in life, a flower of maternal wisdom: "People talk about the conscience, but it seems to me one must just bring it up to a certain point and leave it there. You can let your conscience alone if you're nice to the second house-maid." Mrs. Brook was as "nice" to Nanda as she was to Sarah Curd—which involved, as may easily be imagined, the happiest conditions for Sarah. "Well," she resumed, reverting to the Duchess on a final appraisement of the girl's air, "I really think I do well by you and that Jane wouldn't have anything to say to-day. You look awfully like mamma," she then threw off as if for the first time of mentioning it.

"Oh, Cousin Jane doesn't care for that," Nanda returned. "What I don't look like is Aggie, for all I try." 264