Page:The Awkward Age (New York, Harper and Brothers, 1899).djvu/62

THE AWKWARD AGE The Duchess glanced at the clock. "What is Mr. Vanderbank looking for?"

Her hostess appeared to oblige her by anxiously thinking. "Oh, he, I'm afraid, poor dear—for nothing at all!"

The Duchess had taken off a glove to appease her appetite, and now, drawing it on, she smoothed it down. "I think he has his ideas."

"The same as yours?"

"Well, more like them than like yours."

"Ah, perhaps then—for he and I," said Mrs. Brookenham, "don't agree, I think, on two things in the world. You think poor Mitchy then," she went on, "who's the son of a shoemaker and who might be the grandson of a grasshopper, good enough for my child."

The Duchess appreciated for a moment the superior fit of her glove. "I look facts in the face. It's exactly what I'm doing for Aggie." Then she broke into a certain conscious airiness. "What are you giving her?"

But Mrs. Brookenham took without wincing whatever, as between a masterful relative and an exposed frivolity, might have been the sting of it. "That you must ask Edward. I haven't the least idea."

"There you are again—the virtuous English mother! I've got Aggie's little fortune in an old stocking, and I count it over every night. If you've no old stocking for Nanda, there are worse fates than shoemakers and grasshoppers. Even with one, you know, I don't at all say that I should sniff at poor Mitchy. We must take what we can get, and I shall be the first to take it. You can't have everything for ninepence." And the Duchess got up, shining, however, with a confessed light of fantasy. "Speak to him, my dear—speak to him!"

"Do you mean offer him my child?"

The Duchess laughed at the intonation. "There you are once more—vous autres! If you're shocked at the idea, you place drôlement your delicacy. I'd offer mine 52