Page:The Awkward Age (New York, Harper and Brothers, 1899).djvu/448

THE AWKWARD AGE He had dropped into a chair as he talked, and so long as she remained in her own they were confronted; but she presently got up and, the next moment, while he kept his place, was busy restoring order to the objects that both her visitors had disarranged. "If you weren't delightful you'd be dreadful!"

"There we are! I could easily, in other words, frighten you if I would."

She took no notice of the remark, only, after a few more scattered touches, producing an observation of her own. "He's going, all the same, Mr. Van, to be charming to mother. We've settled that."

"Ah, then he can make time—?"

She hesitated. "For as much as that—yes. For as much, I mean, as may sufficiently show her that he has not given up. So don't you recognize how much more time you can make?"

"Ah—see precisely—there we are again!" Mitchy promptly ejaculated.

Yet he had gone, it seemed, further than she followed. "But where—?"

"Why, as I say, at the roots and in the depths of things."

"Oh!" She dropped to an indifference that was but part of her general patience for all his irony. "It's needless to go into the question of not giving your mother up. One simply doesn't give her up. One can't. There she is."

"That's exactly what he says. There she is."

"Ah, but I don't want to say nothing but what 'he' says!" Mitchy laughed. "He can't at all events have mentioned to you any such link as the one that in my case is now almost the most sensible. I've got a wife, you know."

"Oh, Mitchy!" the girl protestingly, though vaguely, murmured. 438