Page:The Awkward Age (New York, Harper and Brothers, 1899).djvu/334

THE AWKWARD AGE "Well," said Nanda, "she's dreadfully frightened."

"Oh, she mustn't allow herself," he returned, "to be too much carried away by it. But we're to have your mother?"

"Yes, and papa. It's really for Mitchy and Aggie," the girl went on—"before they go abroad."

"Oh then, I see what you've come up for! Tishy and I are not in it. It's all for Mitchy."

"If you mean there's nothing I wouldn't do for him, you're quite right. He has always been of a kindness to me—"

"That culminated in marrying your friend?" Vanderbank asked. "It was charming, certainly, and I don't mean to diminish the merit of it. But Aggie herself, I gather, is of a charm now—!"

"Isn't she?"—Nanda was eager. "Hasn't she come out?"

"With a bound—into the arena. But when a young person's out with Mitchy—"

"Oh, you mustn't say anything against that. I've been out with him myself."

"Ah, but my dear child—!" Van frankly argued.

It was not, however, a thing to notice. "I knew it would be just so. It always is when they've been like that."

"Do you mean as she apparently was? But doesn't it make one wonder a little if she was?"

"Oh, she was—I know she was. And we're also to have Harold," Nanda continued—"another of Mitchy's beneficiaries. It would be a banquet, wouldn't it? if we were to have them all."

Vanderbank hesitated, and the look he fixed on the door might have suggested a certain open attention to the arrival of their hostess or the announcement of other guests. "If you haven't got them all, you've got, in having me, I should suppose, about the biggest." 324