Page:The Awkward Age (New York, Harper and Brothers, 1899).djvu/275

BOOK SIXTH: MRS. BROOK "Ah, you shouldn't try—you can do nothing with it. One must be what one is."

Mrs. Brook was almost sententious, but Nanda, with civility, let it pass. "No one in London touches her. She's quite by herself. When one sees her one feels her to be the real thing."

Mrs. Brook, without harshness, wondered. "What do you mean by the real thing?"

Even Nanda, however, had to think a moment. "Well, the real young one. That's what Lord Petherton calls her," she mildly joked—"'the young 'un.'"

Her mother's echo was not for the joke, but for something else. "I know what you mean. What's the use of being good?"

"Oh, I didn't mean that," said Nanda. "Besides, isn't Aggie of a goodness—"

"I wasn't talking of her. I was asking myself what's the use of my being."

"Well, you can't help it, any more than the Duchess can help—"

"Ah, but she could if she would!" Mrs. Brook broke in with a sharper ring than she had yet given. "We can't help being good perhaps, if that burden is laid on us—but there are lengths, in other directions, we're not absolutely obliged to go. And what I think of when I stick in the pins," she went on, "is that Jane seems to me really never to have had to pay." She appeared, for a minute, to brood on this till she could no longer bear it; after which she jerked out: "Why, she has never had to pay for anything!"

Nanda had by this time seated herself, taking her place, under the interest of their talk, on her mother's sofa, where, except for the removal of her long, soft gloves, which one of her hands, again and again, drew caressingly through the other, she remained very much as if she were some friendly yet circumspect young visitor 265