Page:The Awkward Age (New York, Harper and Brothers, 1899).djvu/76

THE AWKWARD AGE as, while he watched his fellow-visitor move to a distance with their host, he glanced about the room, taking in afresh the Louis Quinze secretary, which looked better closed than open, and for which he always had a knowing eye. "Remarkably charming mud!"

"Well, that's what a great deal of the element really appears, to-day, to be thought; and precisely, as a specimen, Mitchy dear, those two French books you were so good as to send me and which—really, this time, you extraordinary man!" She fell back, intimately reproachful, from the effect produced on her, renouncing all expression save that of the rolled eye.

"Why, were they particularly dreadful?"—Mitchy was honestly surprised. "I rather liked the one in the pink cover—what's the confounded thing called?—I thought it had a sort of a something-or-other." He had cast his eye about as if for a glimpse of the forgotten title, and she caught the question as he vaguely and goodhumoredly dropped it.

"A kind of a morbid modernity? There is that," she dimly conceded.

"Is that what they call it? Awfully good name. You must have got it from old Van!" he gaily declared.

"I dare say I did. I get the good things from him and the bad ones from you. But you're not to suppose," Mrs. Brookenham went on, "that I've discussed your horrible book with him."

"Come, I say!" Mr. Mitchett protested; "I've seen you with books from Vanderbank which, if you have discussed them with him—well," he laughed, "I should like to have been there!"

"You haven't seen me with anything like yours—no, no, never, never!" She was particularly positive. "He, on the contrary, gives tremendous warnings, makes apologies, in advance, for things that—well, after all, haven't killed one." 66