Page:The Awkward Age (New York, Harper and Brothers, 1899).djvu/86

THE AWKWARD AGE Brookenham resolutely quayerecl—"he'll never come to the scratch. And to feel that as I do," she explained, "can only be, don't you also see? to want to save her."

It would have appeared at last that poor Mitchy did see. "By taking it in time? By forbidding him the house?"

She seemed to stand with little nipping scissors in a garden of alternatives. "Or by shipping her off. Will you help me to save her?" she broke out again after a moment. "It isn't true," she continued, "that she has any aversion to you."

"Have you charged her with it?" Mitchy demanded with a courage that amounted to high gallantry.

It inspired, on the spot, his interlocutress; and her own, of as fine a quality now as her diplomacy, which was saying much, fell but little below. "Yes, my dear friend—frankly."

"Good. Then I know what she said."

"She absolutely denied it."

"Oh yes—they always do, because they pity me," Mitchy smiled. "She said what they always say—that the effect I produce is, though at first upsetting, one that, little by little, they find it possible to get used to. The world's full of people who are getting used to me," Mr. Mitchett concluded.

"It's what I shall never do, for you're quite too delicious!" Mrs. Brookenham declared. "If I haven't threshed you out really more with Nanda," she continued, "it has been from a scruple of a sort you people never do a woman the justice to impute. You're the object of views that have so much more to set them off."

Mr. Mitchett, on this, jumped up; he was clearly conscious of his nerves; he fidgeted away a few steps, then, with his hands in his pockets, fixed on his hostess a countenance more controlled. "What does the Duchess mean by your daughter's being—as I understood you to quote her just now—'damaged and depraved'?" 76