Page:The Awkward Age (New York, Harper and Brothers, 1899).djvu/89

BOOK SECOND: LITTLE AGGIE The Duchess, on the first blush, lent herself to the humor of the case. "Well, Petherton, of 'those'?—I defy him to finish his sentence!" she smiled to the others.

"Of those," said his lordship, "who flatter themselves that when you do happen to find them somewhere your first idea is not quite to jump at a pretext for getting off somewhere else. Especially," he continued to jest, "with a man of Mitchy's vile reputation."

"Oh!" Edward Brookenham exclaimed at this, but only as if with quiet relief.

"Mitchy's offer is perfectly safe, I may let him know," his wife remarked, "for I happen to be sure that nothing would really induce Jane to leave Aggie five minutes among us here without remaining herself to see that we don't become improper."

"Well then, if we're already pretty far on the way to it," Lord Petherton resumed, "what on earth might we arrive at in the absence of your control? I warn you. Duchess," he joyously pursued, "that if you go out of the room with Mitchy I shall rapidly become quite awful."

The Duchess, during this brief passage, never took her eyes from her niece, who rewarded her attention with the sweetness of consenting dependence. The child's foreign origin was so delicately but unmistakably written in all her exquisite lines that her look might have expressed the modest detachment of a person to whom the language of her companions was unknown. The Duchess then glanced round the circle. "You're very odd people, all of you, and I don't think you quite know how ridiculous you are. Aggie and I are simple stranger-folk; there's a great deal we don't understand; yet we're none the less not easily frightened. In what is it, Mr. Mitchett," she asked, "that I've wounded your susceptibilities?"

Mr. Mitchett hesitated; he had apparently found time 79