Page:The Awkward Age (New York, Harper and Brothers, 1899).djvu/279

BOOK SIXTH: MRS. BROOK The girl showed an indulgence for this interest that was for a moment almost elderly. "I enjoy awfully, with him, seeing just how to take him."

Her tone and her face evidently put forth, for her companion, at this juncture, something freshly, even quite supremely, suggestive; and yet the effect of them on Mrs. Brook's part was only a question so off-hand that it might already often have been asked. The mother's eyes, to ask it, we may none the less add, attached themselves closely to the daughter's and her own face just glowed. "You like him so very awfully?"

It was as if the next instant Nanda felt herself on her guard. Yet she spoke with a certain surrender. "Well, it's rather intoxicating to be one's self—" She had only a drop over the choice of her term.

"So tremendously made up to, you mean—even by a little fussy, ancient man? But doesn't he, my dear," Mrs. Brook continued, with encouragement, "make up to you?"

A supposititious spectator would certainly, on this, have imagined in the girl's face the delicate dawn of a sense that her mother had suddenly become vulgar, together with a general consciousness that the way to meet vulgarity was always to be frank and simple. "He makes one enjoy being liked so much—liked better, I do think, than I've ever been liked by any one."

If Mrs. Brook hesitated it was, however, clearly not because she had noticed. "Not better, surely, than by dear Mitchy? Or even, if you come to that, by Tishy herself."

Nanda's simplicity maintained itself. "Oh, Mr. Longdon's different from Tishy."

Her mother again hesitated. "You mean, of course, he knows more?"

The girl considered it. "He doesn't know more. But he knows other things—and he's pleasanter than Mitchy." 269