Page:The Awkward Age (New York, Harper and Brothers, 1899).djvu/281

BOOK SIXTH: MRS. BROOK him. I mean I'm little by little changing him—gradually showing him that, as I couldn't possibly have been different, and as also, of course, one can't keep giving up, the only way is for him not to mind and to take me just as I am. That, don't you see? is what he would never have expected to do."

Mrs. Brook recognized, in a manner, the explanation, but still had her wistfulness. "But—a—to take you, 'as you are,' where?"

"Well, to the South Kensington Museum."

"Oh!" said Mrs. Brook. Then, however, in a more exemplary tone: "Do you enjoy so very much long hours with him?"

Nanda appeared for an instant to think how to express it. "Well, we're great friends."

"And always talking about Granny?"

"Oh no—really almost never now."

"He doesn't think so awfully much of her?" There was an oddity of eagerness in the question—a hope, a kind of dash, for something that might have been in Nanda's interest.

The girl met these things only with obliging gravity. "I think he's losing any sense of my likeness. He's too used to it, or too many things that are too different now cover it up."

"Well," said Mrs. Brook, as she took this in, "I think it's awfully clever of you to get only the good of him and have none of the worry."

Nanda wondered. "The worry?"

"You leave that all to me," her mother went on, but quite forgivingly. "I hope, at any rate, that the good, for you, will be real."

"Real?" the girl, remaining vague, again echoed.

Mrs. Brook, at this, showed though not an irritation, a flicker of austerity. "You must remember that we've a great many things to think about. There are things we 271