Page:The Awkward Age (New York, Harper and Brothers, 1899).djvu/282

THE AWKWARD AGE must take for granted in each other—we must all help, in our way, to pull the coach. That's what I mean by worry, and if you don't have any, so much the better for you—for me it's in the day's work. Your father and I have most to think about, always, at this time, as you perfectly know—when we have to turn things round and manage somehow or other to get out of town, have to provide and pinch, to meet all the necessities, with money, money, money, at every turn, running away like water. The children, this year, seem to fit into nothing, into nowhere, and Harold's more dreadful than he has ever been, doing nothing at all for himself and requiring everything to be done for him. He talks about his American girl, with millions, who's so awfully taken with him, but I can't find out anything about her; the only one, just now, that people seem to have heard of is the one Bobby Manger's engaged to. The Mangers literally snap up everything," Mrs. Brook quite wailingly now continued: "the Jew man, so gigantically rich—who is he? Baron Schack or Schmack—who has just taken Cumberland House and who has the awful stammer—or what is it? no roof to his mouth—is to give that horrid little Algie, to do his conversation for him, four hundred a year, which Harold pretended to me that, of all the rush of young men—dozens!—he was most in the running for. Your father's settled gloom is terrible, and I bear all the brunt of it; we get literally nothing, this year, for the Hovel, yet have to spend on it heaven knows what; and everybody, for the next three months, in Scotland and everywhere, has asked us for the wrong time, and nobody for the right: so that I assure you I don't know where to turn—which doesn't, however, in the least prevent every one coming to me with their own selfish troubles." It was as if Mrs. Brook had found the cup of her secret sorrows suddenly jostled by some touch of which the perversity, though not completely noted at 272