Page:The Awkward Age (New York, Harper and Brothers, 1899).djvu/276

THE AWKWARD AGE to whom Mrs. Brook had on some occasion dropped "Do come." But there was something perhaps more expressly conciliatory in the way she had kept everything on: as if, in particular serenity and to confirm kindly Mrs. Brookes sense of what had been done for her, she had neither taken off her great feathered hat nor laid down her parasol of pale green silk, the "match"' of hat and ribbons, and which had an expensive, precious knob. Our spectator would possibly have found too much earnestness in her face to be sure if there was also candor. "And do you mean that you have had to pay—?"

"Oh yes—all the while." With this Mrs. Brook was a little short, and also as she added, as if to banish a slight awkwardness: "But don't let it discourage you."

Nanda seemed an instant to weigh the advice, and the whole thing would have been striking as another touch in the picture of the old want, on the part of each, of any sense of levity in the other. Whatever escape, when together, mother or daughter might ever seek would never be the humorous one—a circumstance, however, that might by no means, on occasion, have failed to make their interviews droll for a third person. It would always indeed, for such a person, have produced an impression of tension beneath the surface. "I could have done much better at the start and have lost less time," the girl at last said, "if I hadn't had the drawback of not really remembering Granny."

"Oh well, I remember her!" Mrs. Brook moaned with an accent that evidently struck her the next moment as so much out of place that she slightly deflected. She took Nanda's parasol and held it as if—a more delicate thing much than any one of hers—she simply liked to have it. "Her clothes—at your age at least—must have been hideous. Was it at the place he took you to that he gave you tea?" she then went on. 266