Page:The Awkward Age (New York, Harper and Brothers, 1899).djvu/312

THE AWKWARD AGE, with his air of blind emotion, to the window, where, for a minute, he looked out. "It has stopped raining," he said at last; "it's going to brighten."

The place had three windows, and Nanda went to the| next. "Not quite yet—but I think it will."

Mitchy soon faced back into the room, where, after a brief hesitation, he moved, as quietly—almost as cautiously—as if on tiptoe, to the seat occupied by his companion at the beginning of their talk. Here he sank down, watching the girl, who stood awhile longer with her eyes on the garden. "You want me, you say, to take her out of the Duchess's life; but where am I myself, if we come to that, but even more in the Duchess's life than Aggie is? I'm in it by my contacts, my associations, my indifferences—all my acceptances, knowledges, amusements. I'm in it by my cynicisms—those that circumstances somehow from the first, when I began, for myself, to look at life and the world, committed me to and steeped me in; I'm in it by a kind of desperation that I shouldn't have felt perhaps if you had got hold of me sooner with just this touch with which you've go hold of me to-day; and I'm in it, more than all—you'll yourself admit—by the very fact that her aunt desires, as you know, much more even than you do, to bring the thing about. Then we should be—the Duchess and I—shoulder to shoulder!"

Nanda heard him, motionless, to the end, taking also another minute to turn over what he had said. "What is it you like so in Lord Petherton?" she asked as she came to him.

"My dear child, if you could only tell me! It would be, wouldn't it?—it must have been—the subject of some fairy-tale, if fairy-tales were made now, or, better still, of some Christmas pantomime: 'The Gnome and the Giant.

Nanda appeared to try—not with much success—to see it. "Do you find Lord Petherton a Gnome?" 302