Page:The Awkward Age (New York, Harper and Brothers, 1899).djvu/46

THE AWKWARD AGE truth. I thought I should find something—I had noticed; and I do hope you'll let me keep it, because if you don't it's all up with me. I stopped over on purpose—on purpose, I mean, to tell you what I've done. Don't you call that a sense of honor? And now you only stand and glower at me."

Mrs. Brookenham was, in her forty-first year, still charmingly pretty, and the nearest approach she made, at this moment, to meeting her son's description of her was by looking beautifully desperate. She had about her the pure light of youth—would always have it; her head, her figure, her flexibility, her flickering color, her lovely, silly eyes, her natural, quavering tone all played together toward this effect by some trick that had never yet been exposed. It was at the same time remarkable that—at least in the bosom of her family—she rarely wore an appearance of gaiety less qualified than at the present juncture; she suggested, for the most part, the luxury, the novelty, of woe, the excitement of strange sorrows and the cultivation of fine indifferences. This was her special sign—an innocence dimly tragic. It gave immense effect to her other resources. She opened the secretary with the key she had quickly found, then with the aid of another rattled out a small drawer; after which she pushed the drawer back, closing the whole thing. "You terrify me—you terrify me," she again said.

"How can you say that when you showed me just now how well you know me? Wasn't it just on account of what you thought I might do that you took out the keys as soon as you came in?" Harold's manner had a way of clearing up whenever he could talk of himself.

"You're too utterly disgusting, and I shall speak to your father:" with which, going to the chair he had given up, his mother sank down again with her heavy book. There was no anger, however, in her voice, and not even a harsh plaint; only a detached, accepted 36