Page:The Awkward Age (New York, Harper and Brothers, 1899).djvu/48

THE AWKWARD AGE that if you don't keep us at home you must keep us in other places. One can't live anywhere for nothing—it's all bosh that a fellow saves by staying with people. I don't know how it is for a lady, but a man practically, is let in—"

"Do you know you kill me, Harold?" Mrs. Brookenham wofully interposed. But it was with the same remote melancholy that, in the next breath, she asked: "It wasn't an invitation—to Brander?"

"It's as I told you. She said she'd write, fixing a time; but she never did write."

"But if you wrote—"

"It comes to the same thing? Does it?—that's the question. If on my note she didn't write—that's what I mean. Should one simply take it that one is wanted? I like to have these things from you, mother. I do, I believe, everything you say; but to feel safe and right I must just have them. Any one would want me, eh?"

Mrs. Brookenham had opened her eyes, but she still attached them to the cornice. "If she hadn't wanted you she would have written. In a great house like that there's always room."

The young man watched her a moment. "How you do like to tuck us in and then sit up yourself! What do you want to do, anyway? What are you up to, mummy?"

She rose, at this, turning her eyes about the room as if from the extremity of martyrdom or the wistfulness of some deep thought. Yet when she spoke it was with a different expression, an expression that would have served, for an observer, as a marked illustration of that disconnectedness of her parts which frequently was laughable even to the degree of contributing to her social success.

"You've spent then more than four pounds in five days. It was on Friday I gave them to you. What in the world do you suppose is going to become of me?"

Harold continued to look at her as if the question 38