THE AWKWARD AGE
"I've seized you without a scruple," she frankly said, "for there are things I want to say to you as well as, very particularly, to ask. More than anything else, course, I want again to thank you."
No collapse of Mr. Longdon's was ever incompatible with his sitting well forward. "'Again'?"
"Do you look so blank," she demanded, "because you've really forgotten the gratitude I expressed to you when you were so good as to bring Nanda up for Aggie's marriage?—or because you don't think it a matter I should trouble myself to return to? How can I help it," she went on without waiting for his answer, "if I see your hand in everything that has happened since the so interesting talk I had with you last summer at Mertle? There have been times when I've really thought of writing to you; I've even had a bold bad idea of proposing myself to you for a Sunday. Then the crisis, my momentary alarm, has struck me as blowing over, and I've felt I could wait for some luck like this, which would sooner or later come." Her companion, however, appeared to leave the luck so on her hands that she could only snatch up, to cover its nudity, the next handsomest assumption. "I see you cleverly guess that what I've been worried about is the effect on Mrs. Brook of the loss of her dear Mitchy. If you've not, at all events, had your own impression of this effect, isn't that only because, these last months, you've seen so little of her? I've seen," said the Duchess, "enough and to spare." She waited as if for her vision, on this, to be flashed back at her, but the only result of her speech was that her friend looked hard at somebody else. It was just this symptom indeed that perhaps sufficed her, for in a minute she was again afloat. "Things have turned out so much as I desire them that I should really feel wicked not to have a humble heart. There's a quarter indeed," she added with a noble unction, "to which I don't fear
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