Page:The Awkward Age (New York, Harper and Brothers, 1899).djvu/467

BOOK TENTH: NANDA long ago saw and showed you felt—extraordinary now. We can't help it. It isn't really our fault. There's so much else that's extraordinary that if we're in it all so much we must naturally be." It was all obviously clearer to her than it had ever been, and her sense of it found renewed expression; so that she might have been, as she wound up, a very much older person than her friend. "Everything's different from what it used to be."

"Yes, everything," he returned with an air of final indoctrination. "That's what he ought to have recognized."

"As you have?" Nanda was once more—and completely now—enthroned in high justice. "Oh, he's more old-fashioned than you."

"Much more," said Mr. Longdon with a queer face.

"He tried," the girl went on—"he did his best. But he couldn't. And he's so right—for himself."

Her visitor, before meeting this, gathered in his hat and stick, which for a minute occupied his attention. "He ought to have married—"

"Little Aggie? Yes," said Nanda.

They had gained the door, where Mr. Longdon again met her eyes. "And then Mitchy—"

But she checked him with a quick gesture. "No—not even then!"

So again, before he went, they were for a minute confronted. "Are you anxious about Mitchy?"

She faltered, but at last brought it out. "Yes. Do you see? There I am."

"I see. There we are. Well," said Mr. Longdon—"to-morrow."