Page:The Awkward Age (New York, Harper and Brothers, 1899).djvu/93

BOOK SECOND: LITTLE AGGIE her beauty, her timidity, her wickedness, her notoriety and her impudeur. It's only in this country that a woman is both so shocking and so shaky." The Duchess's displeasure overflowed. "If she doesn't know how to be good—"

"Let her at least know how to be bad? Ah," Mitchy replied, "your irritation testifies more than anything else could do to our peculiar genius, or our peculiar want of it. Our vice is intolerably clumsy—if it can possibly be a question of vice in regard to that charming child, who looks like one of the new-fashioned bill-posters, only, in the way of 'morbid modernity,' as Mrs. Brook would say, more extravagant and funny than any that have yet been risked. I remember," he continued, "Mrs. Brook's having spoken of her to me lately as 'wild.' Wild?—why, she's simply tameness run to seed. Such an expression shows the state of training to which Mrs. Brook has reduced the rest of us."

"It doesn't prevent, at any rate, Mrs. Brook's training, some of the rest of you being horrible," the Duchess declared. "What did you mean just now, really, by asking me to explain before Aggie this so serious matter of Nanda's exposure?" Then instantly, taking herself up before Mr. Mitchett could answer: "What on earth do you suppose Edward's saying to my darling?"

Brookenham had placed himself, side by side with the child, on a distant little settee, but it was impossible to make out from the countenance of either whether a sound had passed between them. Aggie's little manner was too developed to show, and her host's not developed enough. "Oh, he's awfully careful," Lord Petherton reassuringly observed. "If you or I or Mitchy say anything bad, it's sure to be before we know it and without particularly meaning it. But old Edward means it—!"

"So much that, as a general thing, he doesn't dare to say it?" the Duchess asked. "That's a pretty picture of 83