Page:The Awkward Age (New York, Harper and Brothers, 1899).djvu/319

BOOK SEVENTH: MITCHY look; he smoked and smoked, then looked at the tip of his cigarette. "You feel convinced she knows?" he inquired.

"Well, it's my impression."

"Ah, any impression of yours—of that sort—is sure to be right. If you think I ought to have it from you I'm really grateful. Is that—a—what you wanted to say to me?" Vanderbank with a slight hesitation demanded.

Mitchy, watching him more than he watched Mitchy, shook a mildly decisive head. "No."

Vanderbank, his eyes on his smoke puffs, seemed to wonder. "What you wanted is—something else?"

"Something else."

"Oh!" said Vanderbank for the third time.

The ejaculation had been vague, but the movement that followed it was definite; the young man, turning away, found himself again near the chair he had quitted, and resumed possession of it as a sign of being at his friend's service. This friend, however, not only hung fire, but finally went back to take a shot from a quarter they might have been supposed to have left. "It strikes me as odd his imagining—awfully acute as he is—that she has not guessed. One wouldn't have thought he could live with her here in such an intimacy—seeing her every day and pretty much all day—and make such a mistake."

Vanderbank, his great length all of a lounge again, turned it over. "And yet I do thoroughly feel the mistake's not yours."

Mitchy had a new serenity of affirmation. "Oh, it's not mine."

"Perhaps then"—it occurred to Vanderbank—"he doesn't really believe it."

"And only says so to make you feel more easy?"

"So that one may—in fairness to one's self—keep one's head, as it were, and decide quite on one's own grounds."

"Then you have still to decide?" 309