Page:The Awkward Age (New York, Harper and Brothers, 1899).djvu/296

THE AWKWARD AGE She thought a moment. "Because in that case I mightn't have understood? But that I do understand is just what you've always meant."

Always,' my dear Nanda? I feel somehow," he rejoined very kindly, "as if you overwhelmed me!"

"You 'feel' as if I did—but the reality is just that I don't. The day I overwhelm you, Mr. Van—!" She let that pass, however; there was too much to say about it, and there was something else much simpler. "Girls understand now. It has got to be faced, as Tishy says."

"Oh well," Vanderbank laughed, "we don't require Tishy to point that out to us. What are we all doing, most of the time, but trying to face it?"

"Doing? Aren't you doing rather something very different? You're just trying to dodge it. You're trying to make believe—not perhaps to yourselves, but to us—that it isn't so."

"But surely you don't want us to be any worse!"

She shook her head with brisk gravity. "We don't care really what you are."

His amusement now dropped to her straighter. "Your 'we' is awfully beautiful. It's charming to hear you speak for the whole lovely lot. Only you speak, you know, as if you were just the class apart that you yet complain of our—by our scruples—implying you to be."

She considered this objection with her eyes on his face. "Well then, we do care. Only—"

"Only it's a big subject."

"Oh, yes—no doubt; it's a big subject." She appeared to wish to meet him on everything reasonable. "Even Mr. Longdon admits that."

Vanderbank wondered. "You mean you talk over with him—"

"The subject of girls? Why, we scarcely discuss anything else."

"Oh, no wonder, then, you're not bored. But you 286