Page:The Awkward Age (New York, Harper and Brothers, 1899).djvu/37

BOOK FIRST: LADY JULIA what was nice of her. She was a person with whom I could talk about her."

Vanderbank took a moment to clear up the ambiguity. "Oh, you mean you could talk about the other! You hadn't got over Lady Julia."

Mr. Longdon sadly smiled at him. "I haven't got over her yet!" Then, however, as if not to look too woful, he took pains to be lucid. "The first wound was bad—but from that one always comes round. Your mother, dear woman, had known how to help me. Lady Julia was at that time her intimate friend—it was she who introduced me there. She couldn't help what happened—she did her best. What I meant just now was that, in the after-time, when opportunity occurred, she was the one person with whom I could always talk and who always understood." Mr. Longdon appeared to lose himself an instant in the deep memories to which, now, he alone survived to testify; then he sighed out, as if the taste of it all came back to him with a faint sweetness: "I think they must both have been good to me. At the period at Malvern—the particular time I just mentioned to you—Lady Julia was already married, and during those first years she was whirled out of my ken. Then her own life took a quieter turn; we met again; I went, for a long time, often to her house. I think she rather liked the state to which she had reduced me, though she didn't, you know, in the least presume upon it. The better a woman is—it has often struck me—the more she enjoys, in a quiet way, some fellow's having been rather bad, rather dark and desperate, about her—for her. I dare say, I mean, that, though Lady Julia insisted I ought to marry, she wouldn't really have liked it much if I had. At any rate it was in those years that I saw her daughter just cease to be a child—the little girl who was to be transformed by time into the so different person with whom we dined to-night. That comes back to 27