Page:The Awkward Age (New York, Harper and Brothers, 1899).djvu/96

THE AWKWARD AGE assumption of his detachments. "If you mean by that her being the biggest fool alive, I'm quite ready to agree with you. It's exactly what makes me afraid. Yet how can I decently say in particular," he asked, "of what?"

The Duchess still perched on her critical height. "Of what but one of your amazing English periodical public washings of dirty linen? There's not the least necessity to 'say'!" she laughed. "If there's anything more remarkable than these purifications, it's the domestic comfort with which, when it has come and gone, you sport the articles purified."

"It comes back, in all that sphere," Mr. Mitchett instructively suggested, "to our national, our fatal want of style. We can never, dear Duchess, take too many lessons, and there's probably at the present time no more useful function performed among us than that dissemination of neater methods to which you are so good as to contribute."

He had had another idea, but before he reached it his companion had gaily broken in. "Awfully good one for you, Duchess—and I'm bound to say that, for a clever woman, you exposed yourself! I've at any rate a sense of comfort," Lord Petherton pursued, "in the good relations now more and more established between poor Fanny and Mrs. Brook. Mrs. Brook's awfully kind to her and awfully sharp, and Fanny will take things from her that she won't take from me. I keep saying to Mrs. Brook—don't you know?—'Do keep hold of her, and let her have it strong.' She hasn't, upon my honor, any one in the world but me."

"And we know the extent of that resource!" the Duchess harshly exclaimed.

"That's exactly what Fanny says—that she knows it," Petherton good-humoredly assented. "She says my beastly hypocrisy makes her sick. There are people," he pleasantly rambled on, "who are awfully free with 86