Page:The Awkward Age (New York, Harper and Brothers, 1899).djvu/284

THE AWKWARD AGE "Well," she at all events serenely replied, "I really think we're good friends enough for anything."

It might have been, for the light it quickly produced, exactly what her mother had been working to make her say. "What do you call that then, I should like to know, but his adopting you?"

"Ah, I don't know that it matters much what it's called."

"So long as it brings with it, you mean," Mrs. Brook asked, "all the advantages?"

"Well yes," said Nanda, who had now begun dimly smile—"call them advantages."

Mrs. Brook had a pause. "One would be quite ready to do that if one only knew a little more exactly what you're to get by them."

"Oh, the great advantage, I feel, is doing something for him."

Nanda's companion, at this, hesitated afresh. "But doesn't that, my dear, put the extravagance of your surrender to him on rather an odd footing? Charity, love, begins at home, and if it's a question of merely giving, you've objects enough for your bounty without going so far."

The girl, as her stare showed, was held a moment by her surprise, which presently broke out. "Why, I thought you wanted me so to be nice to him!"

"Well, I hope you won't think me very vulgar," said Mrs. Brook, "if I tell you that I want you still more to have some idea of what you'll get by it. I've no wish," she added, "to keep on boring you with Mitchy—"

"Don't, don't!" Nanda pleaded.

Her mother stopped short, as if there were something in her tone that set the limit all the more utterly for being unstudied. Yet poor Mrs. Brook couldn't leave it there. "Then what do you get instead?" 274