Page:The Awkward Age (New York, Harper and Brothers, 1899).djvu/314

THE AWKWARD AGE She put out to him, on this, the hand he had taken a few minutes before, and he clasped it now, only, with the firmness it seemed to give and to ask for. "Oh, it will do for that!" she said as they went out together.

 XXVI

Mitchy, it had been understood, was to take his leave on the morrow, while Vanderbank was to stay till Tuesday. Mr. Longdon had, for the Sunday dinner, invited three or four of his neighbors to "meet" the two gentlemen from town, so that it was not till the company had parted, or in other words till near bedtime, that our four friends could again have become aware, as between themselves, of that directness of mutual relation which forms the subject of our picture. It had not, however, prevented Nanda's slipping up-stairs as soon as the doctor and his wife had gone, and the manner indeed in which, on the stroke of eleven, Mr. Longdon kept up his tradition of appropriating a particular candle was as positive an expression of it as any other. Nothing in him was more amiable than the terms maintained between the rigor of his personal habits and his free imagination of the habits of others. He deprecated, as regards the former, it might have been seen, most signs of resemblance, and no one had ever dared to learn how he would have handled a show of imitation. "The way to flatter him," Mitchy threw off five minutes later, "is not to make him think you're like him, but to let him see how different you perceive he can bear to think you. I mean of course without hating you."

"But what interest have you," Vanderbank asked, "in the way to flatter him?"

"My dear fellow, more than you. I haven't been here 304