Page:The Awkward Age (New York, Harper and Brothers, 1899).djvu/353

BOOK EIGHTH: TISHY GRENDON Vanderbank looked out for another seat. "But I didn't know," she observed with her sweet, free curiosity, "that he called you 'sir. She often made discoveries that were fairly childlike. "He has done it twice."

"Isn't that only your inevitable English surprise," the Duchess demanded, "at the civility quite the commonest in other societies?—so that one has to come here to find it regarded, in the way of ceremony, as the very end of the world!"

"Oh," Mr. Longdon remarked, "it's a word I rather like, myself, even to employ to others."

"I always ask here," the Duchess continued to him, "what word they've got instead. And do you know what they tell me?"

Mrs. Brook wondered, then again, before he was ready, charmingly suggested, "Our pretty manner?" Quickly too she appealed to Mr. Longdon. "Is that what you miss from me?"

He wondered, however, more than Mrs. Brook. "Your 'pretty manner'?"

"Well, these grand old forms that the Duchess is such a mistress of." Mrs. Brook had with this one of her eagerest visions. "Did mamma say 'sir' to you? Ought I? Do you really get it, in private, out of Nanda? She has such depths of discretion," she explained to the Duchess and to Vanderbank, who had come back with his chair, "that it's just the kind of illustrative anecdote she never in the world gives me."

Mr. Longdon looked across at Van, placed now, after a moment's talk with Tishy in sight of them all, by Mrs. Brook's arm of the sofa. "You haven't protected—you've only exposed me."

"Oh, there's no joy without danger—" Mrs. Brook took it up with spirit. "Perhaps one should even say there's no danger without joy."

Vanderbank's eyes had followed Mrs. Grendon after 343