Page:The Awkward Age (New York, Harper and Brothers, 1899).djvu/315

BOOK SEVENTH: MITCHY all day without arriving at conclusions on the credit he has opened to you—!"

"Do you mean the amount he'll settle?"

"You have it in your power," said Mitchy, "to make it anything you like."

"And is he then—so rich?"

Mitchy was on his feet in the apartment in which their host had left them, and he had at first for this question but an expressive motion of the shoulders in respect to everything in the room. "See, judge, guess, feel!"

But it was as if Vanderbank, before the fire, consciously controlled his attention. "Oh, I don't care a hang!"

This passage took place in the library and as a consequence of their having confessed, as their friend faced them with his bedroom light, that a brief, discreet vigil and a box of cigarettes would fix better than anything else the fine impression of the day. Mitchy might at that moment, on the evidence of the eyes Mr. Longdon turned to them and of which his innocent candle-flame betrayed the secret, have found matter for a measure of the almost extreme allowances he wanted them to want of him. They had only to see that the greater window was fast and to turn out the library lamp. It might really have amused them to stand a moment at the open door that, apart from this, was to testify to his conception of those who were not, in the smaller hours, as he was. He had in fact by his retreat—and but too sensibly—left them there with a deal of midnight company. If one of these presences was the mystery he had himself mixed, the manner of our young men showed a due expectation of the others. Mitchy, on hearing how little Vanderbank, "cared," only kept up a while longer that observant revolution in which he had spent much of his day, to which any fresh sense of any exhibition always promptly committed him, and which, had it not been controlled by infinite tact, might have affected the nerves of those in 305