Page:The Awkward Age (New York, Harper and Brothers, 1899).djvu/398

THE AWKWARD AGE Mitchy glared about. "Well, don't take it ill if, in return for that, I say that I myself want to see every one. I could have done even, just now, with a little more of Edward."

Mrs. Brook, in her own manner and with a slow headshake, looked lovely. "I couldn't." Then she puzzled it out with a pause: "It even does come over me that if you don't mind—"

"What, my dear woman," said Mitchy, encouragingly, "did I ever mind? I assure you," he laughed, "I haven't come back to begin!"

At this suddenly, dropping everything else, she laid her hand on him. "Mitchy love, are you happy?"

So for a moment they stood confronted. "Not perhaps as you would have tried to make me."

"Well, you've still got me, you know."

"Oh," said Mitchy, "I've got a great deal. How, if I really look at it, can a man of my peculiar nature—it is, you know, awfully peculiar—not be happy? Think, if one is driven to it, for instance, of the breadth of my sympathies."

Mrs. Brook, as a result of thinking, appeared for a little to demur. "Yes—but one mustn't be too much driven to it. It's by one's sympathies that one suffers. If you should do that, I couldn't bear it."

She clearly evoked for Mitchy a definite image. "It would be funny, wouldn't it? But you wouldn't have to. I'd go off and do it alone somewhere—in a dark room, I think, or on a desert island; at any rate where nobody should see. Where's the harm, moreover," he went on, "of any suffering that doesn't bore one, as I'm sure, however much its outer aspect might amuse some others, mine wouldn't bore me? What I should do in my desert island or my dark room, I feel, would be just to dance about with the thrill of it—which is exactly the exhibition of ludicrous gambols that I would fain have 388