Page:The Awkward Age (New York, Harper and Brothers, 1899).djvu/385

BOOK NINTH: VANDERBANK mere rash impulse. There was a time, in fact, wasn't there? when we rather enjoyed each other's dim depths. If I wanted to fawn upon you," she went on, "I might say that, with such a comrade in obliquity to wind and double about with, I'd risk losing myself in the mine. But why retort or recriminate? Let us not, for God's sake, be vulgar—we haven't yet, bad as it is, come to that. I can be, no doubt—I some day must be: I feel it looming at me out of the awful future as an inevitable fate. But let it be for when I'm old and horrible; not an hour before. I do want to live a little even yet. So you ought to let me off easily—even as I let you."

"Oh, I know," said Vanderbank handsomely, "that there are things you don't put to me! You show a tact!"

"There it is. And I like much better," Mrs. Brook went on, "our speaking of it as delicacy than as duplicity. If you understand, it's so much saved."

"What I always understand more than anything else," he returned, "is the general truth that you're prodigious."

It was perhaps a little as relapse from tension that she had nothing against that. "As for instance, when it would be so easy—"

"Yes, to take up what lies there, you yet so splendidly abstain."

"You literally press upon me my opportunity? It's you who are splendid!" Mrs. Brook rather strangely laughed.

"Don't you at least want to say," he went on with a slight flush, "what you most obviously and naturally might?"

Appealed to on the question of underlying desire, Mrs. Brook went through the decent form of appearing to try to give it the benefit of any doubt. "Don't I want, you mean, to find out before you go up what you want? Shall you be too disappointed," she asked, "if I say that, as I 375