Page:The Awkward Age (New York, Harper and Brothers, 1899).djvu/466

THE AWKWARD AGE "Oh, but when have we talked?" he sharply interrupted.

This time he had challenged her so straight that it was her own look that strayed. "When?"

"When."

She hesitated. "When haven't we?"

"Well, you may have: if that's what you call talking—never saying a word. But I haven't. I've only to do, at any rate, in the way of reasons, with my own."

"And yours too then remain? Because, you know," the girl pursued, "I am like that."

"Like what?"

"Like what he thinks." Then so gravely that it was almost a supplication, "Don't tell me," she added, "that you don't know what he thinks. You do know."

Their eyes, on that strange ground, could meet at last, and the effect of it was presently for Mr. Longdon. "I do know."

"Well?"

"Well!" He raised his hands and took her face, which he drew so close to his own that, as she gently let him, he could kiss her with solemnity on the forehead. "Come!" he then very firmly said—quite indeed as if it were a question of their moving on the spot.

It literally made her smile, which, with a certain compunction, she immediately corrected by doing for him, in the pressure of her lips to his cheek, what he had just done for herself. "To-day?" she more seriously asked.

He looked at his watch. "To-morrow."

She paused, but clearly for assent. "That's what I mean by your taking me as I am. It is, you know, for a girl—extraordinary."

"Oh, I know what it is!" he exclaimed with an odd weariness in his tenderness.

But she continued, with the shadow of her scruple, to explain. "We're many of us, we're most of us—as you 456