Page:The Awkward Age (New York, Harper and Brothers, 1899).djvu/81

BOOK SECOND: LITTLE AGGIE Mitchy could only stare, and the wide noonday light of his regard was at such moments really the redemption of his ugliness. "What 'is' there? Is there anything?"

"It's too beautiful," Mrs. Brookenham appreciatively sighed, "your relation with him! You won't compromise him."

"It would be nicer of me," Mitchy laughed, "not to want to compromise her."

"Oh, Jane!" Mrs. Brookenham dropped. "Does he like her?" she continued. "You must know."

"Ah, it's just my knowing that constitutes the beauty of my loyalty—of my delicacy." He had his quick jumps too. "Am I never, never to see the child?"

This inquiry appeared only to confirm his companion in the contemplation of what was touching in him. "You're the most delicate thing I know, and it crops up, in the oddest way, in the intervals of your depravity. Your talk's half the time impossible; you respect neither age nor sex nor condition; one doesn't know what you'll say or do next; and one has to return your books—c'est tout dire—under cover of darkness. Yet there's in the midst of all this, and in the depths of you, a little deep-down delicious niceness, a sweet sensibility, that one has actually, one's self, shocked as one perpetually is at you, quite to hold one's breath and stay one's hand for fear of ruffling or bruising. There's no one with whom, in talking," she balmily continued, "I find myself half so often suddenly moved to pull up short. You've more little toes to tread on—though you pretend you haven't: I mean morally speaking, don't you know?—than even I have myself, and I've so many that I could wish most of them cut off. You never spare me a shock—no, you don't do that: it isn't the form your delicacy takes. But you'll know what I mean, all the same, I think, when I tell you that there are lots I spare you!"

Mr. Mitchett fairly glowed with the candor of his 71