Page:The Awkward Age (New York, Harper and Brothers, 1899).djvu/78

THE AWKWARD AGE "I'll send then my usual messenger," said Mitcliy, "a person I keep for such jobs, thoroughly seasoned, as you may imagine, and of a discretion—what do you call it?—à touts épreuve. Only you must let me say that I like your terror about Harold! Do you suppose he spends his time over Dr. Watts's hymns?"

Mrs. Brookenham just hesitated, and nothing, in general, was so becoming to her as the act of hesitation. "Dear Mitchy, do you know I want awfully to talk to you about Harold?"

"About his reading, Mrs. Brook?" Mitchy responded with interest. "The worse things are, let me just mention to you about that, the better they seem positively to be for one's feeling up in the language. They're more difficult, the bad ones—and there's a lot in that. All the young men know it—those who are going up for exams."

She had her eyes for a little on Lord Petherton and her husband; then, as if she had not heard what her interlocutor had just said, she overcame her last scruple. "Dear Mitchy, has he had money from you?"

He stared with his good goggle eyes—he laughed out. "Why on earth—? But do you suppose I'd tell you if he had?"

"He hasn't really borrowed the most dreadful sums?"

Mitchy was highly diverted. "Why should he? For what, please?"

"That's just it—for what? What does he do with it all? What in the world becomes of it?"

"Well," Mitchy suggested, "he's saving up to start a business. Harold's irreproachable—hasn't a vice. Who knows, in these days, what may happen? He sees further than any young man I know. Do let him save."

She looked far away with her sweet world-weariness. "If you weren't an angel, it would be a horror to be talking to you. But I insist on knowing." She insisted 68