Page:The Awkward Age (New York, Harper and Brothers, 1899).djvu/31

BOOK FIRST: LADY JULIA Vanderbank saw in this too many deep things not to follow them up. One of these was, to begin with, that his friend had not more than half succumbed to Mrs. Brookenham's attraction, if indeed, by a fine originality, he had not resisted it altogether. That in itself, for an observer deeply versed in this lady, was delightful and beguiling. Another indication was that he found himself, in spite of such a break in the chain, distinctly predisposed to Nanda. "If she reproduces then so vividly Lady Julia," the young man threw out, "why does she strike you as so much less pretty than her foreign friend there, who is, after all, by no means a prodigy?"

The subject of this address, with one of the photographs in his hand, glanced, while he reflected, at the other. Then with a subtlety that matched itself for the moment with Vanderbank's: "You just told me yourself that the little foreign person—"

"Is ever so much the lovelier of the two? So I did. But you've promptly recognized it. It's the first time," Vanderbank went on, to let him down more gently, "that I've heard Mrs. Brookenham admit the girl's looks."

"Her own girl's? 'Admit' them?"

"I mean grant them to be even as good as they are. I myself, I must tell you, extremely like them. I think Lady Julia's granddaughter has in her face, in spite of everything—"

"What do you mean by everything?" Mr. Longdon broke in with such an approach to resentment that his host's amusement overflowed.

"You'll see—when you do see. She has no features. No, not one," Vanderbank inexorably pursued; "unless indeed you put it that she has two or three too many. What I was going to say was that she has in her expression all that's charming in her nature. But beauty, in London"—and, feeling that he held his visitor's 21