Page:The Awkward Age (New York, Harper and Brothers, 1899).djvu/98

THE AWKWARD AGE then while Mitchy again subsided in his place, "You're not, as a race, clever, you're not delicate, you're not sane, but you're capable of extraordinary good looks," she resumed. "Vous avez parfois la grande beauté."

Mitchy was much amused. "Do you really think Petherton has?"

The Duchess withstood it. "They've got, both outside and in, the same great general things, only turned, in each, rather different ways, a way safer for him, as a man, and more triumphant for her as—whatever you choose to call her! What can a woman do," she richly mused, "with such beauty as that—"

"Except come desperately to advise with Mrs. Brook"—Mitchy undertook to complete her question—"as to the highest use to make of it? But see," he immediately added, 'how perfectly competent to instruct her our friend now looks." Their hostess had advanced to Lady Fanny with an outstretched hand, but with an eagerness of greeting merged a little in the sweet predominance of wonder as well as in the habit, at such moments most perceptible, of the languid lily-bend. Nothing, in general, could have been less poorly conventional than the kind of reception given in Mrs. Brookenham's drawing-room to the particular element—the element of physical splendor void of those disparities that make the questions of others tiresome—comprised in Lady Fanny's presence. It was a place in which, at all times, before interesting objects, the unanimous occupants, almost more concerned for each other's vibrations than for anything else, were apt rather more to exchange sharp and silent searchings than to fix their eyes on the object itself. In the case of Lady Fanny, however, the object itself—and quite by the same law that had worked, though less profoundly, on the entrance of little Aggie—superseded the usual rapt communion very much in the manner of some beautiful 88