Page:The Awkward Age (New York, Harper and Brothers, 1899).djvu/369

BOOK EIGHTH: TISHY GRENDON Mrs. Brook, who looked immensely struck, replied with the promptest sympathy, yet as if there might have been an alternative. "I don't think"—and her eyes appealed to the others—"that we want any more, do we? than the whole thing."

"Gracious, I should hope not!" her husband remarked, as privately as before, to Vanderbank. "Jane—for a mixed company—does go into it."

Vanderbank, for a minute and with a special short arrest, took in the circle. "Should you call us 'mixed'? There's only one girl."

Edward Brookenham glanced at his daughter. "Yes, but I wish there were more."

"Do you?" And Vanderbank's laugh at this odd view covered, for a little, the rest of the talk. But when he again began to follow no victory had yet been snatched.

It was Mrs. Brook, naturally, who rattled the standard. "When you say, dearest, that we don't know what to 'do' with Aggie's cleverness, do you quite allow for the way we bow down before it and worship it? I don't quite see what else we—in here—can do with it, even though we have gathered that, just over there, Petherton is finding for it a different application. We can only each in our way do our best. Don't therefore succumb, Jane, to the delusive charm of a grievance. There would be nothing in it. You haven't got one. The beauty of the life that so many of us have so long led together"—and she showed that it was for Mr. Longdon she more particularly brought this out—"is precisely that nobody has ever had one. Nobody has dreamed of it—it would have been such a rough, false note, a note of violence out of all keeping. Did you ever hear of one, Van? Did you, my poor Mitchy? But you see for yourselves," she wound up with a sigh and before either could answer, "how inferior we've become when we have even in our defence to assert such things." 359