Page:The Awkward Age (New York, Harper and Brothers, 1899).djvu/297

BOOK SEVENTH: MITCHY mean," Vanderbank asked, "that he recognizes the inevitable change—?"

"He can't shut his eyes to the facts. He sees we're quite a different thing."

"I dare say"—her friend was fully appreciative. "Yet the old thing—what do you know of it?"

"I personally? Well, I've seen some change even in my short life. And aren't the old books full of us? Then Mr. Longdon himself has told me."

Vanderbank smoked and smoked. "You've gone into it with him?"

"As far as a man and a woman can together."

As he took her in at this, with a turn of his eye, he might have had in his ears the echo of all the times it had been dropped in Buckingham Crescent that Nanda was "wonderful." She was indeed. "Oh, he's of course, on certain sides, shy."

"Awfully—too beautifully. And then there's Aggie," the girl pursued. "I mean for the real old thing."

"Yes, no doubt—if she be the real old thing. But what the deuce, really, is Aggie?"

"Well," said Nanda with the frankest interest, "she's a miracle. If one could be her exactly, absolutely, without the least little mite of change, one would probably do the best thing to close with it. Otherwise—except for anything but that—I'd rather brazen it out as myself."

There fell between them, on this, a silence of some minutes, after which it would probably not have been possible for either to say if their eyes had met while it lasted. This was, at any rate, not the case as Vanderbank at last exclaimed: "Your brass, my dear young lady, is pure gold!"

"Then it's of me, I think, that Harold ought to borrow."

"You mean therefore that mine isn't?" Vanderbank inquired. 287