Page:The Awkward Age (New York, Harper and Brothers, 1899).djvu/99

BOOK SECOND: LITTLE AGGIE tame tigress who might really coerce attention. There was in Mrs. Brookenham's way of looking up at her a dim, despairing abandonment of the idea of any common personal ground. Lady Fanny, magnificent, simple, stupid, had almost the stature of her brother, a forehead unsurpassably low and an air of sombre concentration just sufficiently corrected by something in her movements that failed to give it a point. Her blue eyes were heavy in spite of being perhaps a couple of shades too clear, and the wealth of her black hair, the disposition of the massive coils of which was all her own, had possibly a satin sheen depreciated by the current fashion. But the great thing in her was that she was, with unconscious heroism, thoroughly herself; and what were Mrs. Brook and Mrs. Brook's intimates, after all, in their free surrender to the play of perception, but a happy association for keeping her so? The Duchess was moved to the liveliest admiration by the grand, simple sweetness of her encounter with Mrs. Donner, a combination indeed in which it was a question if she or Mrs. Brook appeared to the higher advantage. It was poor Mrs. Donner—not, like Mrs. Brook, subtle in sufficiency, nor, like Lady Fanny, almost too simple—who made the poorest show. The Duchess immediately marked it to Mitchy as infinitely characteristic that their hostess, instead of letting one of her visitors go, kept them together by some sweet ingenuity and, while Lord Petherton, dropping his sister, joined Edward and Aggie in the other angle, sat there between them as if, in pursuance of some awfully clever line of her own, she were holding a hand of each. Mr. Mitchett, of course, did justice all round, or at least, as would have seemed from an inquiry he presently made, wished not to fail of it. "Is it your real impression then that Lady Fanny has serious grounds—?"

"For jealousy of that preposterous little person? My dear Mitchett," the Duchess resumed after a moment's 89