Page:The Awkward Age (New York, Harper and Brothers, 1899).djvu/75

BOOK SECOND: LITTLE AGGIE its retreat from detection. Dressed, on the other hand, not as gentlemen dress, in London, to pay their respects to the fair, he excited by the exhibition of garments that had nothing in common save the violence and the independence of their pattern a suspicion that, in the desperation of humility, he wished to make it public that he had thrown to the winds the effort to please. It was written all over him that he had judged, once for all, his personal case, and that as his character, superficially disposed to gaiety, deprived him of the resource of shyness and shade, the effect of comedy might not escape him if secured by a real plunge. There was comedy therefore in the form of his pot-hat and the color of his spotted shirt, in the systematic disagreement, above all, of his coat, waistcoat and trousers. It was only on long acquaintance that his so many ingenious ways of showing that he recognized his commonness could present him as secretly rare.

"And Where's the child, this time?" he asked of his hostess as soon as he was seated near her.

"Why do you say 'this time'?—as if it were different from any other time!" she replied, as she gave him his tea.

"Only because, as the months and the years elapse, it's more and more of a wonder, whenever I don't see her, to think what she does with herself—or what you do with her. What it does show, I suppose," Mr. Mitchett went on, "is that she takes no trouble to meet me."

"My dear Mitchy," said Mrs. Brookenham, "what do you know about 'trouble'—either poor Nanda's, or mine, or anybody's else? You've never had to take any in your life, you're the spoiled child of fortune, and you skim over the surface of things in a way that seems often to represent you as supposing that everybody else has wings. Most other people are sticking fast in their native mud."

"Mud, Mrs. Brook—mud, mud!" he protestingly cried 65