THE AWKWARD AGE
with you, but you mustn't think I've come here to let you say to me such dreadful things as that." He was an odd compound, Mr. Cashmore, and the air of personal good health, the untarnished bloom which sometimes lent a monstrous serenity to his mention of the barely mentionable, was on occasion balanced or matched by his playful application of extravagant terms to matters of much less moment. "You know what I come to you for, Mrs. Brook: I won't come any more if you're going to be horrid and impossible."
"You come to me, I suppose, because—for my deep misfortune, I assure you—I've a kind of vision of things, of the wretched miseries in which you all knot yourselves up, which you yourselves are as little blessed with as if, tumbling about together in your heap, you were a litter of blind kittens."
"Awfully good, that—you do lift the burden of my trouble!" He had laughed out, in the manner of the man who made notes, for platform use, of things that might serve; but the next moment he was grave again, as if his observation had reminded him of Harold's praise of his wit. It was in this spirit that he abruptly brought out: "Where, by-the-way, is your daughter?"
"I haven't the least idea. I do all I can to enter into her life, but you can't get into a railway train while it's on the rush."
Mr. Cashmore swung back to hilarity. "You give me lots of things. Do you mean she's so 'fast'?" He could keep the ball going.
Mrs. Brookenham hesitated. "No; she's a tremendous dear, and we're great friends. But she has her free young life, which, by that law of our time that I'm sure I only want, like all other laws, once I know what they are, to accept—she has her precious freshness of feeling which I say to myself that, so far as control is concerned, I ought to respect. I try to get her to sit with me, and
136
