Page:The Awkward Age (New York, Harper and Brothers, 1899).djvu/371

BOOK EIGHTH: TISHY GRENDON back seats and causing a variety of mute expression smoothly to circulate, was pretty well on its feet. "See—he has pulled her off!" said Mrs. Brook.

Little Aggie, to whom plenty of pearls were singularly becoming, met it as pleasant sympathy. "Yes, and it was a real pull. But of course," she continued with the prettiest humor and as if Mrs. Brook would quite understand, "from the moment one has a person's nails, and almost his teeth, in one's flesh—!"

Mrs. Brook's sympathy passed, however, with no great ease from Aggie's pearls to her other charms; fixing the former indeed so markedly that Harold had a quick word about it for Lady Fanny. "When poor mummy thinks, you know, that Nanda might have had them—!"

Lady Fanny's attention, for that matter, had resisted them as little. "Well, I dare say that if I had wanted, I might!"

"Lord—could you have stood him?" the young man returned. "But I believe women can stand anything!" he profoundly concluded. His mother meanwhile, recovering herself, had begun to ejaculate on the prints on Aggie's arms, and he was then diverted from the sense of what he, "personally," as he would have said, couldn't have stood, by a glance at Lord Petherton's trophy, for which he made a prompt grab. "The bone of contention?" Lord Petherton had let it go, and Harold stood arrested by the cover. "Why, blest if it hasn't Van's name!"

"Van's?"—his mother was near enough to effect her own snatch, after which she swiftly faced the proprietor of the volume. "Dear man, it's the last thing you lent me! But I don't think," she added, turning to Tishy, "that I ever passed such a production on to you."

"It was just seeing Mr. Van's hand," Aggie conscientiously explained, "that made me think one was free—!"

"But it isn't Mr. Van's hand!"—Mrs. Brook quite 361