Page:The Awkward Age (New York, Harper and Brothers, 1899).djvu/45

BOOK SECOND: LITTLE AGGIE "What will you do for me," he asked, "if I oblige you?"

He never moved—but as if only the more directly and intimately to meet her—and she stood again before the fire and sounded his strange little face. "I don't know what it is, but you give me sometimes a kind of terror."

"A terror, mamma?"

She found another place, sinking sadly down and opening her book, and the next moment he got up and came over to kiss her, on which she drew her cheek wearily aside. "You bore me quite to death," she panted, "and I give you up to your fate."

"What do you call my fate?"

"Oh, something dreadful—if only by its being publicly ridiculous." She turned vaguely the pages of her book. "You're too selfish—too sickening."

"Oh, dear, dear!" he wonderingly whistled while he wandered back to the hearth-rug on which, with his hands, behind him, he lingered awhile. He was small and had a slight stoop, which somehow gave him character—a character somewhat of the insidious sort, carried out in the acuteness, difficult to trace to a source, of his smooth fair face, whose lines were all curves and its expression all needles. He had the voice of a man of forty, and was dressed—as if markedly not for London—with an air of experience that seemed to match it. He pulled down his waistcoat, smoothing himself, feeling his neat hair and looking at his shoes; then he said to his mother: "I took your five pounds. Also two of the sovereigns," he went on. "I left you two pound ten." She jerked up her head at this, facing him in dismay, and, immediately on her feet, passed back to the secretary.

"It's quite as I say," he insisted; "you should have locked it before, don't you know? It grinned at me there with all its charming brasses, and what was I to do? Darling mummy, I couldn't start—that was the 35