Page:The Awkward Age (New York, Harper and Brothers, 1899).djvu/440

THE AWKWARD AGE "So far as it is an intimacy."

"But didn't you, by-the-way"—and he looked again at his watch—"tell me they're just about to turn up together?"

"Oh, not so very particularly together."

"Mitchy first alone?" Vanderbank asked.

She had a smile that was dim, that was slightly strange. "Unless you'll stay for company."

"Thanks—impossible. And then Mr. Longdon alone?"

"Unless Mitchy stays."

He had another pause. "You haven't, after all, told me about the efflorescence of his wife."

"How can I if you don't give me time?"

"I see—of course not." He seemed to feel for an instant the return of his curiosity. "Yet it won't do, will it? to have her out before him? No, I must go." He came back to her, and at present she gave him a hand. "But if you do see Mr. Longdon alone will you do me a service? I mean indeed not simply to-day, but with all other good chances?"

She waited. "Any service. But which first?"

"Well," he returned in a moment, "let us call it a bargain. I look after your mother—"

"And I—?" She had had to wait again.

"Look after my good name. I mean for common decency to him. He has been of a kindness to me that, when I think of my failure to return it, makes me blush from head to foot. I've odiously neglected him—by a complication of accidents. There are things I ought to have done that I haven't. There's one in particular—but it doesn't matter. And I haven't even explained about that. I've been a brute, and I didn't mean it, and I couldn't help it. But there it is. Say a good word for me. Show him somehow or other that I'm not a brute. In short," the young man said, quite flushed once more with the intensity of his thought, "let us have it that 430