Page:The Awkward Age (New York, Harper and Brothers, 1899).djvu/345

BOOK EIGHTH: TISHY GRENDON to say for myself that no day and no night pass without my showing it. However, you English, I know, don't like one to speak of one's religion. I'm just as simply thankful for mine—I mean with as little sense of indecency or agony about it—as I am for my health or my carriage. My point is, at any rate, that I say in no cruel spirit of triumph, yet do, none the less, very distinctly say, that Mr. Mitchett's disgusted patroness may be now to be feared." These words had the sound of a climax, and she had brought them out as if, with her duty done, to leave them; but something that took place, for her eye, in the face Mr. Longdon had half averted gave her after an instant what he might have called her second wind. "Oh, I know you think she always has been. But you've exaggerated—as to that; and I don't say that even at present it's anything we sha'n't get the better of. Only we must keep our heads. We must remember that from her own point of view she has her grievance, and we must at least look as if we trusted her. That, you know, is what you've never quite done."

Mr. Longdon gave out a murmur of discomfort which produced in him a change of position, and the sequel to the change was that he presently accepted from his cushioned angle of the sofa the definite support it could offer. If his eyes, moreover, had not met his companion's, they had been brought, by the hand he repeatedly and somewhat distressfully passed over them, closer to the question of which of the alien objects presented to his choice it would cost him least to profess to handle. What he had already paid, a spectator would easily have gathered from the long, suppressed wriggle that had ended in his falling back, was some sacrifice of his habit of not privately depreciating those to whom he was publicly civil. It was plain, however, that when he presently spoke his thought had taken a stretch. "I'm sure I've fully intended to be everything that's 335