Page:The Awkward Age (New York, Harper and Brothers, 1899).djvu/414

THE AWKWARD AGE His companion took it from him. "Deep."

"And yet somehow it isn't abject."

The old man wondered. Abject'?"

"I mean it isn't pitiful. In its way," Mitchy developed, "it's happy."

This too, though rather ruefully, Mr. Longdon could take from him. "Yes—in its way."

"Any passion so great, so complete," Mitchy went on, "is—satisfied or unsatisfied—a life." Mr. Longdon looked so interested that his fellow-visitor, evidently touched by what was now an appeal and a dependence, grew still more bland, or at least more assured, for affirmation. "She's not too sorry for herself."

"Ah, she's so proud!"

"Yes, but that's a help."

"Oh—not for us!"

It arrested Mitchy, but his ingenuity could only rebound. "In one way: that of reducing us to feel that the desire to 'make up' to her is—well, mainly for our relief. If she 'trusts' us, as I said just now, it isn't for that she does so." As his friend appeared to wait then to hear, it was presently with positive joy that he showed he could meet the last difficulty. "What she trusts us to do"—oh, Mitchy had worked it out!—"is to let him off."

"Let him off?" It still left Mr. Longdon dim.

"Easily. That's all."

"But what would letting him off hard be? It seems to me he's—on any terms—already beyond us. He is off."

Mr. Longdon had given it a sound that suddenly made Mitchy appear to collapse under a sharper sense of the matter. "He is off," he moodily echoed.

His companion, again a little bewildered, watched him; then with impatience: "Do, please, tell me what has happened."

He quickly pulled himself round. "Well, he was, 404