Page:The Awkward Age (New York, Harper and Brothers, 1899).djvu/442

THE AWKWARD AGE She again considered. "Well, I think I did rather. He was awfully beautiful and kind."

"Oh," Mitchy concurred, "trust him always for that!"

"He wrote me, on my note," Nanda pursued, "a tremendously good answer."

Mitchy was struck afresh. "Your note? What note?"

"To ask him to come. I wrote at the beginning of the week."

"Oh—I see," Mitchy observed as if this were rather different. "He couldn't then of course have done less than come."

Yet his companion again thought. "I don't know."

"Oh come—I say: you do know," Mitchy laughed. "I should like to see him—or you either!" There would have been for a continuous spectator of these episodes an odd resemblance between the manner and all the movements that had followed his entrance and those that had accompanied the installation of his predecessor. He laid his hat, as Vanderbank had done, in three places in succession, and appeared to have very much the same various views about the security of his stick and the retention in his hand of his gloves. He postponed the final selection of a seat, and he looked at the objects about him while he spoke of other matters. Quite in the same fashion indeed at last these objects impressed him. "How charming you've made your room, and what a lot of nice things you've got!"

"That's just what Mr. Van said too. He seemed immensely struck."

But Mitchy hereupon, once more, had a drop to extravagance. "Can I do nothing then but repeat him? I came, you know, to be original."

"It would be original for you," Nanda promptly returned, "to be at all like him. But you won't," she went back, "not sometimes come for mother only? You'll have plenty of chances." 432