Page:The Awkward Age (New York, Harper and Brothers, 1899).djvu/391

BOOK NINTH: VANDERBANK, looked straight at the toes of his boots. "Are you very sure?" Then as he remained without an answer: "Why should she if he hasn't told her—"

"Of the way I so long ago let you know that he had put the matter to Van? It's not out between them in words, no doubt; but I fancy that, for things to pass, they've not to dot their i's quite so much, my dear, as we two. Without a syllable said to her, she's yet aware in every fibre of her little being of what has taken place."

Edward gave a still longer space to taking this in. "Poor little thing!"

"Does she strike you as so poor," Mrs. Brook asked, "with so awfully much done for her?"

"Done by whom?"

It was as if she had not heard the question that she spoke again. "She has got what every woman, young or old, wants."

"Really?"

Edward's tone was of wonder, but she simply went on. "She has got a man of her own."

"Well, but if he's the wrong one?"

"Do you call Mr. Longdon so very wrong? I wish," she declared with a strange sigh, "that I had had a Mr. Longdon!"

"I wish very much you had. I wouldn't have taken it like Van."

"Oh, it took Van," Mrs. Brook replied, "to put them where they are."

"But where are they? That's exactly it. In these three months, for instance," Edward demanded, "how has their connection profited?"

Mrs. Brook turned it over. "Profited which?"

"Well, one cares most for one's child."

"Then she has become for him what we've most hoped her to be—an object of compassion still more marked."

"Is that what you've hoped her to be?" 381