Page:The Awkward Age (New York, Harper and Brothers, 1899).djvu/409

BOOK NINTH: VANDERBANK "Ah" said Mitchy, "I knew you'd do it! But hush—they're coming!" On which, while she whisked away, he went back to the fire.

 XXXIV

Ten minutes of talk with Mr. Longdon by Mrs. Brookenham's hearth elapsed for him without his arriving at the right moment to take up the business so richly put before him in his previous interview. No less time indeed could have sufficed to bring him into closer relation with this affair, and nothing, at first, could have been more marked than the earnestness of his care not to show impatience of inquiries that were, for a person of his old friend's general style, simple recognitions and decencies. There was a limit to the mere allusiveness with which, in Mr. Longdon's school of manners, a foreign tour might be treated, and Mitchy, no doubt, plentifully showed that none of his frequent returns had encountered a curiosity at once so explicit and so discreet. To belong to a circle in which most of the members might be at any moment on the other side of the globe was inevitably to fall into the habit of few questions, as well as into that of making up for their fewness by their freedom. This interlocutor, in short, while Mrs. Brook's representative privately thought over all he had in hand, went at some length and very charmingly—since it was but a tribute to common courtesy—into the Virgilian associations of the Bay of Naples. Finally, however, he started, his eye on the clock. "I'm afraid that, though our hostess doesn't appear, I mustn't forget myself. I too came back but yesterday and I've an engagement—for which I'm already late—with Miss Brookenham, who has been so good as to ask me to tea."

The divided mind, the express civility, the decent 399