Page:The Awkward Age (New York, Harper and Brothers, 1899).djvu/307

BOOK SEVENTH: MITCHY "You'll just happily sit and watch me spin? Thank you! That will be my reward?"

Nanda, on this, rose from her chair as with the impulse of protest. "Sha'n't you care for my gratitude, my admiration?"

"Oh yes"—Mitchy seemed to muse. "I shall care for them. But I don't quite see, you know, what you owe to Aggie. It isn't as if—" But with this he faltered.

"As if she cared particularly for me? Ah, that has nothing to do with it; that's a thing without which, surely, it's but too possible to be exquisite. There are beautiful, quite beautiful people who don't care for me. The thing that's important to one is the thing one sees one's self, and it's quite enough if I see what can be made of that child. Marry her, Mitchy, and you'll see who she'll care for!"

Mitchy kept his position; he was for the moment—his image of shortly before reversed—the one who appeared to sit happily and watch. "It's too awfully pleasant your asking me anything whatever!"

"Well then, as I say, beautifully, grandly save her."

"As you say, yes"—he sympathetically inclined his head. "But without making me feel exactly what you mean by it."

"Keep her," Nanda returned, "from becoming like the Duchess."

"But she isn't a bit like the Duchess in any of her elements. She's a totally different thing."

It was only for an instant, however, that this objection seemed to count. "That's exactly why she'll be so perfect for you. You'll get her away—take her out of her aunt's life."

Mitchy met it all now in a sort of spellbound stillness. "What do you know about her aunt's life?"

"Oh, I know everything!" She spoke with her first faint shade of impatience. 297