Генри Джеймс
The Awkward Age
V
That young lady, in this relation, was certainly a figure to have offered a foundation for the highest hopes. As slight and white, as delicately lovely, as a gathered garden lily, her admirable training appeared to hold her out to them all as with precautionary finger-tips. She presumed, however, so little on any introduction that, shyly and submissively, waiting for the word of direction, she stopped short in the centre of the general friendliness till Mrs. Brookenham fairly became, to meet her, also a shy little girl—put out a timid hand with wonder-struck innocent eyes that hesitated whether a kiss of greeting might be dared. “Why you dear good strange ‘ickle’ thing, you haven’t been here for ages, but it IS a joy to see you and I do hope you’ve brought your doll!”—such might have been the sense of our friend’s fond murmur while, looking at her up and down with pure pleasure, she drew the rare creature to a sofa. Little Aggie presented, up and down, an arrangement of dress exactly in the key of her age, her complexion, her emphasised virginity. She might have been prepared for her visit by a cluster of doting nuns, cloistered daughters of ancient houses and educators of similar products, whose taste, hereditarily good, had grown, out of the world and most delightfully, so queer as to leave on everything they touched a particular shade of distinction. The Duchess had brought in with the child an air of added confidence for which an observer would in a moment have seen the grounds, the association of the pair being so markedly favourable to each. Its younger member carried out the style of her aunt’s presence quite as one of the accessory figures effectively thrown into old portraits. The Duchess on the other hand seemed, with becoming blandness, to draw from her niece the dignity of a kind of office of state—hereditary governess of the children of the blood. Little Aggie had a smile as softly bright as a Southern dawn, and the friends of her relative looked at each other, according to a fashion frequent in Mrs. Brookenham’s drawing-room, in free exchange of their happy impression. Mr. Mitchett was none the less scantly diverted from his estimate of the occasion Mrs. Brookenham had just named to him.
“My dear Duchess,” he promptly asked, “do you mind explaining to me an opinion I’ve just heard of your—with marked originality—holding?”
The Duchess, her head all in the air, considered an instant her little ivory princess. “I’m always ready, Mr. Mitchett, to defend my opinions; but if it’s a question of going much into the things that are the subjects of some of them perhaps we had better, if you don’t mind, choose our time and our place.”
“No ‘time,’ gracious lady, for my impatience,” Mr. Mitchett replied, “could be better than the present—but if you’ve reasons for wanting a better place why shouldn’t we go on the spot into another room?”
Lord Petherton, at this enquiry, broke into instant mirth. “Well, of all the coolness, Mitchy!—he does go at it, doesn’t he, Mrs. Brook? What do you want to do in another room?” he demanded of his friend. “Upon my word, Duchess, under the nose of those—”
The Duchess, on the first blush, lent herself to the humour 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 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 unmistakeably 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. Her protectress 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,” the Duchess asked, “that I’ve wounded your susceptibilities?”
Mr. Mitchett cast about; he had apparently found time to reflect on his precipitation. “I see what Petherton’s up to, and I won’t, by drawing you aside just now, expose your niece to anything that might immediately oblige Mrs. Brook to catch her up and flee with her. But the first time I find you more isolated—well,” he laughed, though not with the clearest ring, “all I can say is Mind your eyes dear Duchess!”
“It’s about your thinking, Jane,” Mrs. Brookenham placidly explained, “that Nanda suffers—in her morals, don’t you know?—by my neglect. I wouldn’t say anything about you that I can’t bravely say TO you; therefore since he has plumped out with it I do confess that I’ve appealed to him on what, as so good an old friend, HE thinks of your contention.”
“What in the world IS Jane’s contention?” Edward Brookenham put the question as if they were “stuck” at cards.
“You really all of you,” the Duchess replied with excellent coolness, “choose extraordinary conditions for the discussion of delicate matters. There are decidedly too many things on which we don’t feel alike. You’re all inconceivable just now. Je ne peux pourtant pas la mettre a la porte, cette cherie”—whom she covered again with the gay solicitude that seemed to have in it a vibration of private entreaty: “Don’t understand, my own darling—don’t understand!”
Little Aggie looked about with an impartial politeness that, as an expression of the general blind sense of her being as to every particular in hands at full liberty either to spot or to spare her, was touching enough to bring tears to all eyes. It perhaps had to do with the sudden emotion with which—using now quite a different manner—Mrs. Brookenham again embraced her, and even with this lady’s equally abrupt and altogether wonderful address to her: “Between you and me straight, my dear, and as from friend to friend, I know you’ll never doubt that everything must be all right!—What I spoke of to poor Mitchy,” she went on to the Duchess, “is the dreadful view you take of my letting Nanda go to Tishy—and indeed of the general question of any acquaintance between young unmarried and young married females. Mr. Mitchett’s sufficiently interested in us, Jane, to make it natural of me to take him into our confidence in one of our difficulties. On the other hand we feel your solicitude, and I needn’t tell you at this time of day what weight in every respect we attach to your judgement. Therefore it WILL be a difficulty for us, cara mia, don’t you see? if we decide suddenly, under the spell of your influence, that our daughter must break off a friendship—it WILL be a difficulty for us to put the thing to Nanda herself in such a way as that she shall have some sort of notion of what suddenly possesses us. Then there’ll be the much stiffer job of putting it to poor Tishy. Yet if her house IS an impossible place what else is one to do? Carrie Donner’s to be there, and Carrie Donner’s a nature apart; but how can we ask even a little lamb like Tishy to give up her own sister?”
The question had been launched with an argumentative sharpness that made it for a moment keep possession of the air, and during this moment, before a single member of the circle could rally, Mrs. Brookenham’s effect was superseded by that of the reappearance of the butler. “I say, my dear, don’t shriek!”—Edward Brookenham had only time to sound this warning before a lady, presenting herself in the open doorway, followed close on the announcement of her name. “Mrs. Beach Donner!”—the impression was naturally marked. Every one betrayed it a little but Mrs. Brookenham, who, more than the others, appeared to have the help of seeing that by a merciful stroke her visitor had just failed to hear. This visitor, a young woman of striking, of startling appearance, who, in the manner of certain shiny house-doors and railings, instantly created a presumption of the lurking label “Fresh paint,” found herself, with an embarrassment oddly opposed to the positive pitch of her complexion, in the presence of a group in which it was yet immediately evident that every one was a friend. Every one, to show no one had been caught, said something extremely easy; so that it was after a moment only poor Mrs. Donner who, seated close to her hostess, seemed to be in any degree in the wrong. This moreover was essentially her fault, so extreme was the anomaly of her having, without the means to back it up, committed herself to a “scheme of colour” that was practically an advertisement of courage. Irregularly pretty and painfully shy, she was retouched from brow to chin like a suburban photograph—the moral of which was simply that she should either have left more to nature or taken more from art. The Duchess had quickly reached her kinsman with a smothered hiss, an “Edward dear, for God’s sake take Aggie!” and at the end of a few minutes had formed for herself in one of Mrs. Brookenham’s admirable “corners” a society consisting of Lord Petherton and Mr. Mitchett, the latter of whom regarded Mrs. Donner across the room with articulate wonder and compassion.
“It’s all right, it’s all right—she’s frightened only at herself!”
The Duchess watched her as from a box at the play, comfortably shut in, as in the old operatic days at Naples, with a pair of entertainers. “You’re the most interesting nation in the world. One never gets to the end of your hatred of the nuance. The sense of the suitable, the harmony of parts—what on earth were you doomed to do that, to be punished sufficiently in advance, you had to be deprived of it in your very cradles? Look at her little black dress—rather good, but not so good as it ought to be, and, mixed up with all the rest, see her type, 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 from 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 if 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 him, inasmuch as for the most part he never speaks. What therefore must he mean?”
“He’s an abyss—he’s magnificent!” Mr. Mitchett laughed. “I don’t know a man of an understanding more profound, and he’s equally incapable of uttering and of wincing. If by the same token I’m ‘horrible,’ as you call me,” he pursued, “it’s only because I’m in everyway so beastly superficial. All the same I do sometimes go into things, and I insist on knowing,” he again broke out, “what it exactly was you had in mind in saying to Mrs. Brook the things about Nanda and myself that she repeated to me.”
“You ‘insist,’ you silly man?”—the Duchess had veered a little to indulgence. “Pray on what ground of right, in such a connexion, do you do anything of the sort?”
Poor Mitchy showed but for a moment that he felt pulled up. “Do you mean that when a girl liked by a fellow likes him so little in return—?”
“I don’t mean anything,” said the Duchess, “that may provoke you to suppose me vulgar and odious enough to try to put you out of conceit of a most interesting and unfortunate creature; and I don’t quite as yet see—though I dare say I shall soon make out!—what our friend has in her head in tattling to you on these matters as soon as my back’s turned. Petherton will tell you—I wonder he hasn’t told you before—why Mrs. Grendon, though not perhaps herself quite the rose, is decidedly in these days too near it.”
“Oh Petherton never tells me anything!” Mitchy’s answer was brisk and impatient, but evidently quite as sincere as if the person alluded to had not been there.
The person alluded to meanwhile, fidgeting frankly in his chair, alternately stretching his legs and resting his elbows on his knees, had reckoned as small the profit he might derive from this colloquy. His bored state indeed—if he was bored—prompted in him the honest impulse to clear, as he would have perhaps considered it, the atmosphere. He indicated Mrs. Donner with a remarkable absence of precautions. “Why, what the Duchess alludes to is my poor sister Fanny’s stupid grievance—surely you know about that.” He made oddly vivid for a moment the nature of his relative’s allegation, his somewhat cynical treatment of which became peculiarly derisive in the light of the attitude and expression, at that minute, of the figure incriminated. “My brother-in-law’s too thick with her. But Cashmore’s such a fine old ass. It’s excessively unpleasant,” he added, “for affairs are just in that position in which, from one day to another, there may be something that people will get hold of. Fancy a man,” he robustly reflected while the three took in more completely the subject of Mrs. Brookenham’s attention—“fancy a man with THAT odd piece on his hands! The beauty of it is that the two women seem never to have broken off. Blest if they don’t still keep seeing each other!”
The Duchess, as on everything else, passed succinctly on this. “Ah how can hatreds comfortably flourish without the nourishment of such regular ‘seeing’ as what you call here bosom friendship alone supplies? What are parties given for in London but—that enemies may meet? I grant you it’s inconceivable that the husband of a superb creature like your sister should find his requirements better met by an object comme cette petite, who looks like a pen-wiper—an actress’s idea of one—made up for a theatrical bazaar. At the same time, if you’ll allow me to say so, it scarcely strikes one that your sister’s prudence is such as to have placed all the cards in her hands. She’s the most beautiful woman in England, but her esprit de conduite isn’t quite on a level. One can’t have everything!” she philosophically sighed.
Lord Petherton met her comfortably enough on this 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 especial,” 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 all has come and gone, you sport the articles purified.”
“It comes back, in all that sphere,” Mr. Mitchett instructively opined, “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 to be performed among us than that dissemination of neater methods to which you’re 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 honour, any one in the world but me.”
“And we know the extent of THAT resource!” the Duchess freely commented.
“That’s exactly what Fanny says—that SHE knows it,” Petherton good-humouredly agreed. “She says my beastly hypocrisy makes her sick. There are people,” he pleasantly rambled on, “who are awfully free with their advice, but it’s mostly fearful rot. Mrs. Brook’s isn’t, upon my word—I’ve tried some myself!”
“You talk as if it were something nasty and homemade—gooseberry wine!” the Duchess laughed; “but one can’t know the dear soul, of course, without knowing that she has set up, for the convenience of her friends, a little office for consultations. She listens to the case, she strokes her chin and prescribes—”
“And the beauty of it is,” cried Lord Petherton, “that she makes no charge whatever!”
“She doesn’t take a guinea at the time, but you may still get your account,” the Duchess returned. “Of course we know that the great business she does is in husbands and wives.”
“This then seems the day of the wives!” Mr. Mitchett interposed as he became aware, the first, of the illustration the Duchess’s image was in the act of receiving. “Lady Fanny Cashmore!”—the butler was already in the field, and the company, with the exception of Mrs. Donner, who remained seated, was apparently conscious of a vibration that brought it afresh, but still more nimbly than on Aggie’s advent, to its feet.
VI
“Go to her straight—be nice to her: you must have plenty to say. YOU stay with me—we have our affair.” The latter of these commands the Duchess addressed to Mr. Mitchett, while their companion, in obedience to the former and affected, as it seemed, by an unrepressed familiar accent that stirred a fresh flicker of Mitchy’s grin, met the new arrival in the middle of the room before Mrs. Brookenham had had time to reach her. The Duchess, quickly reseated, watched an instant the inexpressive concussion of the tall brother and sister; then while Mitchy again subsided into 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 beaute.”
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 conventionally poor than the kind of reception given in Mrs. Brookenham’s drawing-room to the particular element—the element of physical splendour void of those disparities that make the question 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 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 enquiry 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 reflexion, “if you’re so rash as to ask me in any of these connexions for my ‘real’ impression you deserve whatever you may get.” The penalty Mitchy had incurred was apparently grave enough to make his companion just falter in the infliction of it; which gave him the opportunity of replying that the little person was perhaps not more preposterous than any one else, that there was something in her he rather liked, and that there were many different ways in which a woman could be interesting. This further levity it was therefore that laid him fully open. “Do you mean to say you’ve been living with Petherton so long without becoming aware that he’s shockingly worried?”
“My dear Duchess,” Mitchy smiled, “Petherton carries his worries with a bravery! They’re so many that I’ve long since ceased to count them; and in general I’ve been disposed to let those pass that I can’t help him to meet. YOU’VE made, I judge,” he went on, “a better use of opportunities perhaps not so good—such as at any rate enables you to see further than I into the meaning of the impatience he just now expressed.”
The Duchess was admirable, in conversation, for neglecting everything not essential to her present plausibility. “A woman like Lady Fanny can have no ‘grounds’ for anything—for any indignation, I mean, or for any revenge worth twopence. In this particular case at all events they’ve been sacrificed with such extravagance that, as an injured wife, she hasn’t had the gumption to keep back an inch or two to stand on. She can do absolutely nothing.”
“Then you take the view—?” Mitchy, who had, after all, his delicacies, pulled up as at sight of a name.
“I take the view,” said the Duchess, “and I know exactly why. Elle se les passe—her little fancies! She’s a phenomenon, poor dear. And all with—what shall I call it?—the absence of haunting remorse of a good house-mother who makes the family accounts balance. She looks—and it’s what they love her for here when they say ‘Watch her now!’—like an angry saint; but she’s neither a saint nor, to be perfectly fair to her, really angry at all. She has only just enough reflexion to make out that it may some day be a little better for her that her husband shall, on his side too, have committed himself; and she’s only, in secret, too pleased to be sure whom it has been with. All the same I must tell you,” the Duchess still more crisply added, “that our little friend Nanda is of the opinion—which I gather her to be quite ready to defend—that Lady Fanny’s wrong.”
Poor Mitchy found himself staring. “But what has our little friend Nanda to do with it?”
“What indeed, bless her heart? If you WILL ask questions, however, you must take, as I say, your risks. There are days when between you all you stupefy me. One of them was when I happened about a month ago to make some allusion to the charming example of Mr. Cashmore’s fine taste that we have there before us: what was my surprise at the tone taken by Mrs. Brook to deny on this little lady’s behalf the soft impeachment? It was quite a mistake that anything had happened—Mrs. Donner had pulled through unscathed. She had been but a day or two at the most in danger, for her family and friends—the best influences—had rallied to her support: the flurry was all over. She was now perfectly safe. Do you think she looks so?” the Duchess asked.
This was not a point that Mitchy was conscious of freedom of mind to examine. “Do I understand you that Nanda was her mother’s authority—?”
“For the exact shade of the intimacy of the two friends and the state of Mrs. Brook’s information? Precisely—it was ‘the latest before going to press.’ ‘Our own correspondent’! Her mother quoted her.”
Mr. Mitchett visibly wondered. “But how should Nanda know—?”
“Anything about the matter? How should she NOT know everything? You’ve not, I suppose, lost sight of the fact that this lady and Mrs. Grendon are sisters. Carrie’s situation and Carrie’s perils are naturally very present to the extremely unoccupied Tishy, who is unhappily married into the bargain, who has no children, and whose house, as you may imagine, has a good thick atmosphere of partisanship. So, as with Nanda, on HER side, there’s no more absorbing interest than her dear friend Tishy, with whom she’s at present staying and under whose roof she perpetually meets this victim of unjust aspersions—!”
“I see the whole thing from here, you imply?” Mr. Mitchett, under the influence of this rapid evocation, had already taken his line. “Well,” he said bravely, “Nanda’s not a fool.”
A momentary silence on the part of the Duchess might have been her tribute to his courage. “No. I don’t agree with her, as it happens, here; but that there are matters as to which she’s not in general at all befogged is exactly the worst I ever said of her. And I hold that in putting it so—on the basis of my little anecdote—you clearly give out that you’re answered.”
Mitchy turned it over. “Answered?”
“In the quarrel that a while back you sought to pick with me. What I touched on to her mother was the peculiar range of aspects and interests she’s compelled to cultivate by the special intimacies that Mrs. Brook permits her. There they are—and that’s all I said. Judge them for yourself.”
The Duchess had risen as she spoke, which was also what Mrs. Donner and Mrs. Brookenham had done; and Mr. Mitchett was on his feet as well, to act on this last admonition. Mrs. Donner was taking leave, and there occurred among the three ladies in connexion with the circumstance a somewhat striking exchange of endearments. Mr. Mitchett, observing this, expressed himself suddenly as diverted. “By Jove, they’re kissing—she’s in Lady Fanny’s arms!” But his hilarity was still to deepen. “And Lady Fanny, by Jove, is in Mrs. Brook’s!”
“Oh it’s all beyond ME!” the Duchess cried; and the little wail of her baffled imagination had almost the austerity of a complaint.
“Not a bit—they’re all right. Mrs. Brook has acted!” Mitchy went on.
“Ah it isn’t that she doesn’t ‘act’!” his interlocutress ejaculated.
Mrs. Donner’s face presented, as she now crossed the room, something that resembled the ravage of a death-struggle between its artificial and its natural elegance. “Well,” Mitchy said with decision as he caught it—“I back Nanda.” And while a whiff of derision reached him from the Duchess, “Nothing HAS happened!” he murmured.
As to reward him for an indulgence that she must much more have divined than overheard the visitor approached him with her sweet bravery of alarm. “I go on Thursday to my sister’s, where I shall find Nanda Brookenham. Can I take her any message from you?”
