Page:The Awkward Age (New York, Harper and Brothers, 1899).djvu/66

THE AWKWARD AGE him and which she would not have put had she feared a reply. So dry and decent and even distinguished did he look, as if he had positively been created to meet a propriety and match some other piece, his wife, with her notorious perceptions, would no more have appealed to him seriously on a general proposition than she would, for such a response, have rung the drawing-room bell. He was none the less held to have a great general adequacy."What is it that's between them?" he demanded.

"What's between any woman and the man she's making up to?"

"Why, there may often be nothing. I didn't know she even particularly knew him," Brookenham added.

"It's exactly what she would like to prevent any one's knowing, and her coming here to be with him when she knows I know she knows—don't you see?—that he's to be here, is just one of those calculations that are subtle enough to put off the scent a woman who has but half a nose." Mrs. Brookenham, as she spoke, appeared to testify, by the pretty star-gazing way she thrust it into the air, to her own possession of the totality of such a feature. "I don't know yet quite what I think, but one wakes up to such things soon enough."

"Do you suppose it's her idea that he'll marry her?" Brookenham asked in his colorless way.

"My dear Edward!" his wife murmured for all answer.

"But if she can see him in other places, why should she want to see him here?" Edward persisted in a voice destitute of intonation.

Mrs. Brookenham now had plenty of that. "Do you mean if she can see him in his own house?"

"No cream, please," her husband said. "Hasn't she a house too?"

"Yes, but so pervaded all over by Aggie and Miss Merriman." 56