Page:The Awkward Age (New York, Harper and Brothers, 1899).djvu/79

BOOK SECOND: LITTLE AGGIE now with her absurdly pathetic eyes on him. "What kind of sums?"

"You shall never, never find out," Mr. Mitchett replied with extravagant firmness. "Harold is one of my great amusements—I really have awfully few; and if you deprive me of him you'll be a fiend. There are only one or two things I want to live for, but one of them is to see how far Harold will go. Please give me some more tea."

"Do you positively swear—?" she asked with intensity as she helped him. Then without waiting for his answer: "You have the common charity to us, I suppose, to see the position you would put us in. Fancy Edward—!" she quite austerely threw off.

Mr. Mitchett, at this, had, on his side, a hesitation. "Does Edward imagine—?"

"My dear man, Edward never 'imagined' anything in life." She still had her eyes on her interlocutor. "Therefore, if he sees a thing, don't you know? it must exist."

Mitchy, for a little, fixed the person mentioned as he sat with his other guest, but, whatever this person saw, he failed just then to see his wife's companion, whose eyes he never met. His face only offered itself, like a clean, domestic vessel, a receptacle with the peculiar property of constantly serving, yet never filling, to Lord Petherton's talkative splash. "Well, only don't let him take it up. Let it be only between you and me," Mr. Mitchett pleaded; "keep him quiet—don't let him speak to me." He appeared to convey, with his pleasant extravagance, that Edward looked dangerous, and he went on with a rigour of levity: "It must be our little quarrel."

There were different ways of meeting such a tone, but Mrs. Brookenham's choice was remarkably prompt. "I don't think I quite understand what dreadful joke you 69