Page:The Awkward Age (New York, Harper and Brothers, 1899).djvu/389

BOOK NINTH: VANDERBANK "Yes, and seeing you flare up at it. What I bring out is only what they tell me."

This limitation offered, however, for Mrs. Brook, no difficulty. "Ah, but it seems to me that with the things people nowadays tell one—! What more do you want?"

"Well"—and Edward, from his chair, fixed the fire a while—"the difference must be in what they tell you."

"Things that are better?"

"Yes— worse. I dare say," he went on, "what I give them—"

"Isn't as bad as what I do? Oh, we must each do our best. But when I hear from you," Mrs. Brook pursued, "that Nanda has ever permitted herself anything so dreadful as to wire to him, it comes over me afresh that I would have been the perfect one to deal with him if his detestation of me hadn't prevented." She was by this time also—but on her feet—before the fire, into which, like her husband, she gazed, "I would never have wired. I would have gone in for little delicacies and odd things she has never thought of."

"Oh, she doesn't go in for what you do," Edward assented.

"She's as bleak as a chimney-top when the fire's out, and if it hadn't been, after all, for mamma—" And she lost herself again in the reasons of things. Her husband's silence seemed to mark for an instant a deference to her allusion, but there was a limit even to this combination. "You make your mother, I think, keep it up pretty well. But if she hadn't, as you say, done so—?"

"Why, we shouldn't have been anywhere."

"Well, where are we now? That's what I want to know."

Following her own train, she had at first no heed for his inquiry. "Without his hatred he would have liked 379