Page:The Awkward Age (New York, Harper and Brothers, 1899).djvu/381

BOOK NINTH: VANDERBANK —though not so often either. It's from Jane I've heard of what she calls her 'young things.' It seems so odd to think of Mitchy as a young thing. He's as old as all time, and his wife, who the other day was about six, is now practically about forty. And I also saw Petherton," Mrs. Brook added, "on his return."

"His return from where?"

"Why, he was with them at Corfu, Malta, Cyprus—I don't know where; yachting, spending Mitchy's money, 'larking,' he called it—I don't know what. He was with them for weeks."

"Till Jane, you mean, called him in?"

"I think it must have been that."

"Well, that's better," said Van, "than if Mitchy had had to call him out."

"Oh, Mitchy—!" Mrs. Brook comprehensively sounded.

Her visitor quite assented. "Isn't he amazing?"

"Unique."

He had a short pause. "But what's she up to?"

It was apparently for Mrs. Brook a question of such a variety of application that she brought out experimentally: "Jane?"

"Dear, no. I think we've fathomed 'Jane,' haven't we?"

"Well," mused Mrs. Brook, "I'm by no means sure that I have. Just of late I've had a new sense—!"

"Yes, of what now?" Van amusedly put it as she held the note.

"Oh, of depths below depths. But poor Jane—of course after all, she's human. She's beside herself, with one thing and another, but she can't, in any consistency, show it. She took her stand so on having with Petherton's aid, formed Aggie for femme charmante—"

"That it's too late to cry out that Petherton's aid can now be dispensed with? Do you mean then that he is 371