Page:The Awkward Age (New York, Harper and Brothers, 1899).djvu/382

THE AWKWARD AGE such a brute that after all Mitchy has done for him—?" Vanderbank, at the rising image, pulled up in easy disgust.

"I think him quite capable of considering, with a magnificent insolence of selfishness, that what Mitchy has most done will have been to make Aggie accessible in a way that—for decency and delicacy of course, things on which Petherton highly prides himself—she could naturally not be as a girl. Her marriage has simplified it."

Vanderbank took it all in. Accessible' is good! Then—which was what I intended just now—Aggie has already become so?"

Mrs. Brook, however, could as yet, in fairness, only wonder. "That's just what I'm dying to see."

Her companion smiled at it. "'Even in our ashes live their wonted fires'! But what do you make, in such a box, of poor Mitchy himself? His marriage can scarcely to such an extent have simplified him."

It was something, none the less, that Mrs. Brook had to weigh. "I don't know. I give it up. The thing was of a strangeness!"

Her friend also paused, and it was as if, for a little, they remained looking at each other over it and over what was unsaid between them. "It was 'rum'!" he last merely dropped.

It was scarce for Mrs. Brook, all the same—she seemed to feel after a moment—to surround the matter with an excess of silence. "He did what a man does—especially in that business—when he doesn't do what he wants."

"Did, you mean, what somebody else wanted?"

"Well, what he himself didn't. And if he's unhappy," she went on, "he'll know whom to pitch into."

"Ah," said Vanderbank, "even if he is he won't the man to what you might call 'vent' it on her. He'll seek compensations elsewhere and won't mind any ridicule—" 372