THE AWKWARD AGE
can't help it's coming over me then that, on such an extraordinary system, you must also rather like me."
"What will you have, my dear Van?" Mitchy frankh asked. "It's the sort of thing you must be most used to. For at the present moment—look!—aren't we all at you at once?"
It was as if Vanderbank had managed to appear to wonder. "'All'?"
"Nanda, Mrs. Brook, Mr. Longdon—"
"And you. I see."
"Names of distinction. And all the others," Mitchy pursued, "that I don't count."
"Oh, you're the best."
"I?"
"You're the best," Vanderbank simply repeated. "It's at all events most extraordinary," he declared. "But I make you out on the whole better than I do Mr. Longdon."
"Ah, aren't we very much the same—simple lovers of life? That is, of that finer essence of it which appeals to the consciousness—"
"The consciousness?"—his companion took up his hesitation.
"Well, enlarged and improved."
The words had made, on Mitchy's lips, an image by which his friend seemed for a moment to be held. "One doesn't really know quite what to say or to do."
"Oh, you must take it all quietly. You're of a special class; one of those who, as we said the other day—don't you remember?—are a source of the sacred terror. People made in such a way must take the consequences; just as people must take them," Mitchy went on, "who are made as I am. So cheer up!"
Mitchy, uttering this incitement, had moved to the empty chair by the window, in which he presently was sunk; and it might have been in emulation of his previ-
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