Page:The Awkward Age (New York, Harper and Brothers, 1899).djvu/347

BOOK EIGHTH: TISHY GRENDON "Aren't such marked ornaments of life a little the property of all who admire and enjoy them?"

"You 'enjoy' him?" Mr. Longdon asked in the same straightforward way.

"Immensely."

His silence, for a little, seemed the sign of a plan. "What is it he hasn't done with Mrs. Brook?"

"Well, the thing that would be the complication. He hasn't gone beyond a certain point. You may ask how one knows such matters, but I'm afraid I've not quite a receipt for it. A woman knows, but she can't tell. They haven't done, as it's called, anything wrong."

Mr. Longdon frowned. "It would be extremely horrid if they had."

"Ah, but, for you and me who know life, it isn't that that—if other things had made for it—would have prevented! As it happens, however, we've got off easily. She doesn't speak to him—"

She had forms he could only take up. Speak' to him—?"

"Why, as much as she would have liked to be able to believe."

"Then where's the danger of which you appear to wish to warn me?"

"Just in her feeling, in the case, as most women would feel. You see she did what she could for her daughter. She did, I'm bound to say, as that sort of thing goes among you people, a good deal. She treasured up, she nursed along Mitchy, whom she would also, though of course not so much, have liked for herself. Nanda, with a word, could have kept him on, becoming thereby, for your plan, so much the less accessible. That would have thoroughly obliged her mother, but your little English girls, in these altered times—oh, I know how you feel them!—don't stand on such trifles; and—even if you think it odd of me—I can't defend myself, though I've 337