Page:The Awkward Age (New York, Harper and Brothers, 1899).djvu/359

BOOK EIGHTH: TISHY GRENDON thought," she went on to Mrs. Brook, "that Lady Fanny, by this time, must have gone."

"Petherton, then," Mrs. Brook returned, "doesn't keep you au Courant?"

The Duchess blandly wondered. "I seemed to remember he had positively said so. And that she had come back."

"Because this looks so like a fresh start? No. We know. You assume, besides," Mrs. Brook asked, "that Mr. Cashmore would have received her again?"

The Duchess fixed a little that gentleman and his actual companion. "What will you have? He mightn't have noticed."

"Oh, you're out of step. Duchess," Vanderbank said. "We used all to march abreast, but we're falling to pieces. It's all, saving your presence, Mitchy's marriage."

"Ah," Mrs. Brook concurred, "how thoroughly I feel that! Oh, I knew. The spell's broken; the harp has lost a string. We're not the same thing. He's not the same thing."

"Frankly, my dear," the Duchess answered, "I don't think that you personally are either."

"Oh, as for that—which is what matters least—we shall perhaps see." With which Mrs. Brook turned again to Mr. Longdon. "I haven't explained to you what I meant just now. We want Nanda."

Mr. Longdon stared. "At home again?"

"In her little old nook. You must give her back."

"Do you mean altogether?"

"Ah, that will be for you, in a manner, to arrange. But you've had her practically these five months, and, with no desire to be unreasonable, we yet have our natural feelings.

This interchange, to which circumstances somehow gave a high effect of suddenness and strangeness, was 349