Page:The Awkward Age (New York, Harper and Brothers, 1899).djvu/47

BOOK SECOND: LITTLE AGGIE. Mrs. Brookenham's supreme rebellion against fate was just to show with the last frankness how much she was bored.

"No, darling mummy, you won't speak to my father—you'll do anything in the world rather than that," Harold replied, quite as if he were kindly explaining her to herself. "I thank you immensely for the charming way you take what I have done; it was because I had a conviction of that that I waited for you to know it. It was all very well to tell you I would start on my visit—but how the deuce was I to start without a penny in the world? Don't you see that if you want me to go about you must really enter into my needs?"

"I wish to heaven you would leave me—I wish to heaven you would get out of the house," Mrs. Brookenham went on without looking up.

Harold took out his watch. "Well, mamma, now I am ready: I wasn't in the least before. But it will be going forth, you know, quite to seek my fortune. For do you really think—I must have from you what you do think—that it will be all right for me?"

She fixed him at last with her pretty pathos. "You mean for you to go to Brander?"

"You know," he answered with his manner as of letting her see her own attitude, "you know you try to make me do things that you wouldn't at all do yourself. At least I hope you wouldn't. And don't you see that if I so far oblige you I must at least be paid for it?"

His mother leaned back in her chair, gazed for a moment at the ceiling and then closed her eyes. "You are frightful," she said; "you're appalling."

"You're always wanting to get me out of the house," he continued; "I think you want to get us all out, for you manage to keep Nanda from showing even more than you do me. Don't you think your children are good enough, mummy dear? At any rate, it's as plain as 37