Page:The Awkward Age (New York, Harper and Brothers, 1899).djvu/304

THE AWKWARD AGE that you ought to marry a woman really clever, and that I'm not quite sure what there may be of that in Aggie."

"In Aggie?" her friend echoed very gently. "Is that what you've sent for me for—to talk about Aggie?"

"Didn't it occur to you it might be?"

"That it couldn't possibly, you mean, be anything else?" He looked about for the place in which it would express the deepest surrender to the scene to sit, then sank down with a beautiful prompt submission. "I've no idea of what occurred to me—nothing at least but the sense that I had occurred to you. The occurrence is clay in the hands of the potter. Do with me what you will."

"You appreciate everything so wonderfully," Nanda said, "that it oughtn't to be hard for you to appreciate her. I do dream so that you may save her; and that's why I haven't waited."

"The only thing that remains to me in life," he answered, "is a certain accessibility to the thought of what I may still do to figure a little in your eye; but that's precisely a thought you may assist to become clearer. You may for instance give me some pledge or sign that if I do figure—prance and caracole and sufficiently kick up the dust—your eye won't suffer itself to be distracted from me. I think there's no adventure I'm not ready to undertake for you; yet my passion—chastened, through all this, purified, austere—is still enough of this world not wholly to have renounced the fancy of some small reward."

"How small?" the girl asked.

She spoke as if feeling that she must take from him, in common kindness, at least as much as she would make him take, and the serious, anxious patience such a consciousness gave to her tone was met by Mitchy with a charmed reasonableness that his habit of hyperbole did nothing to misrepresent. He glowed at her with the 294