Page:The Awkward Age (New York, Harper and Brothers, 1899).djvu/402

THE AWKWARD AGE "When it comes I'll tell you."

He hung fire, once more, but an instant. "You didn't, yourself, work the thing again?"

She rose, at this, in strange sincerity. "I think, you know, you go very far."

"Why, didn't we just now settle," he promptly replied, "that it's all instinctive and unconscious? If it was so that night at Tishy's—"

"Ah, voyons, voyons," she broke in, "what did I do even then?"

He laughed out at something in her tone. "You'd like it again all pictured—?"

"I'm not afraid."

"Why, you just simply—publicly—took her back."

"And where was the monstrosity of that?"

"In the one little right place. In your removal of every doubt—"

"Well, of what?" He had appeared not quite to know how to put it.

But he saw at last. "Why, of what we may still hope to do for her. Thanks to your care, there were specimens." Then as she had the look of trying vainly to focus a few, "I can't recover them one by one," he pursued, "but the whole thing was quite lurid enough to do us all credit."

She met him after a little, but at such an odd point. "Excuse me if I scarcely see how much of the credit was yours. For the first time since I've known you, you went in for decency."

Mitchy's surprise showed as real. "It struck you as decency—?"

Since he wished she thought it over. "Oh, your behavior—"

"My behavior was—my condition. Do you call that decent? No, you're quite out." He spoke, in his good-nature, with an approach to reproof. "How can I ever—" 392