Page:The Awkward Age (New York, Harper and Brothers, 1899).djvu/298

THE AWKWARD AGE "Well, you really haven't any natural 'cheek'—not like some of them. You're, in yourself, as uneasy, if anything's said and every one giggles or makes some face, as Mr. Longdon, and if Lord Petherton hadn't once told me that a man hates almost as much to be called modest as a woman does, I would say that, very often, in London now, you must pass some bad moments."

The present might precisely have been one of them, we should doubtless have gathered, had we seen fully recorded in Vanderbank's face the degree to which this prompt response embarrassed, or at least stupefied him. But he could always laugh. "I like your 'in London now'!"

"It's the tone and the current and the effect of all the others that push you along," she went on as if she had not heard him. "If such things are contagious, as every one says, you prove it perhaps as much as any one. But you don't begin"—she continued, blandly enough, to work it out for him; "or you can't, at least, originally have begun. Any one would know that now—from the terrific effect I see I produce on you by talking this way. There it is—it's all out before one knows it, isn't it, and I can't help it any more than you can, can I?" So she appeared to put it to him, with something in her lucidity that would have been infinitely touching; strange, grave, calm consciousness of their common doom and of what in especial in it would be worst for herself. He sprang up indeed, after an instant, as if he had been infinitely touched; he turned away, taking, just near her, a few steps to and fro, gazed about the place again, but this time without the air of particularly seeing it, and then came back to her as if from a greater distance. An observer at all initiated would, at the juncture, fairly have hung on his lips, and there was in fact on Vanderbank's part quite the look of the man—though it lasted but just while we seize it—in suspense 288