Page:The Awkward Age (New York, Harper and Brothers, 1899).djvu/354

THE AWKWARD AGE his brief passage with her, terminated by some need of her listless presence on the other side of the room. "What do you say then, on that theory, to the extraordinary gloom of our hostess? Her safety, by such a rule, must be deep."

The Duchess was this time the first to know what they said. "The expression of Tishy's face comes, precisely, from our comparing it so unfavorably with that of her poor sister Carrie, who, though she isn't here to-night with the Cashmores—amazing enough even as coming without that!—has so often shown us that an âme en peine, constantly tottering, but, as Nanda guarantees us, usually recovering, may look, after all, as beatific as a Dutch doll."

Mrs. Brook's eyes had, on Tishy's passing away, taken the same course as Vanderbank's, whom she had visibly not neglected, moreover, while the pair stood there. "I give you Carrie, as you know, and I throw Mr. Cashmore in; but I'm lost in admiration to-night, as I always have been, at the way Tishy makes her ugliness serve. I should call it, if the word weren't so for ladies'-maids the most 'elegant' thing I know."

"My dear child," the Duchess objected, "what you describe as making her ugliness serve is what I should describe as concealing none of her beauty. There's nothing the matter surely with 'elegant,' as applied to Tishy, save that, as commonly used, it refers rather to a charm that's artificial than to a state of pure nature. There should be for elegance a basis of clothing. Nanda rather stints her."

Mrs. Brook, perhaps more than usually thoughtful, just discriminated. "There is, I think, one little place; I'll speak to her."

"To Tishy?" Vanderbank asked.

"Oh, that would do no good. To Nanda. All the same," she continued, "it's an awfully superficial thing 344