Page:The Awkward Age (New York, Harper and Brothers, 1899).djvu/326

THE AWKWARD AGE struck with this. "Well, I don't think it's information that either of us required. But of course she can't help it," he added. "Everything, literally everything, in London, in the world she lives in, is in the air she breathes—so that the longer she's in it, the more she'll know."

"The more she'll know, certainly," Mitchy acknowledged. "But she isn't in it, you see, down here."

"No. Only she appears to have come down with such accumulations. And she won't be here forever," Vanderbank hastened to subjoin.

"Certainly not if you marry her."

"But isn't that, at the same time," Vanderbank asked, "just the difficulty?"

Mitchy looked vague. "The difficulty?"

"Why, as a married woman she'll be steeped in it again."

"Surely"—oh, Mitchy could be candid! "But the difference will be that for a married woman it won't matter. It only matters for girls," he plausibly continued—"and then only for those on whom no one takes pity."

"The trouble is," said Vanderbank—but quite as uttering only a general truth—"that it's just a thing that may sometimes operate as a bar to pity. Isn't it for the non-marrying girls that it doesn't particularly matter? For the others it's such an odd preparation."

"Oh, I don't mind it!" Mitchy declared.

Vanderbank visibly demurred. "Ah, but your choice—"

"Is such a different sort of thing?" Mitchy, for the half-hour, in the ambiguous dusk, had never looked more droll. "The young lady I named isn't my choice."

"Well then, that's only a sign the more that you do these things more easily."

"Oh, 'easily'!" Mitchy murmured.

"We oughtn't, at any rate, to keep it up," said Vanderbank, who had looked at his watch. "Twelve twenty-five—good-night. Shall I blow out the candles?" 316