THE AWKWARD AGE
Mr. Cashmore stared, but there was amusement in it too. "So she'll say it's all right?"
"Oh no; she'll let me have it hot. But she'll recognize that, at such a pass, more must be done for a fellow, and that may lead to something—indirectly, don't you see? for she won't tell my father, she'll only, in her own way, work on him—that will put me on a better footing, and for which, therefore, at bottom, I shall have to thank you."
The eye assisted by Mr. Cashmore's glass had fixed, during this address, with a discernible growth of something like alarm, the subject of his beneficence. The thread of their relations somehow lost itself in this subtler twist, and he fell back on mere stature, position and property, things always convenient in the presence of crookedness. "I shall say nothing to your mother, but I think I shall be rather glad that you're not a son of mine."
Harold wondered at this new element in their talk. "Do your sons never—?"
"Borrow money of their mother's visitors?" Mr. Cashmore had taken him up, eager, evidently, quite to satisfy him; but the question was caught on the wing by Mrs. Brookenham herself, who had opened the door as her friend spoke and who quickly advanced with an echo of it.
"Lady Fanny's visitors?"—and, though her eyes rather avoided than met his own, she seemed to cover her ladyship's husband with a vague but practised sympathy. "What on earth are you saying to Harold about them?" Thus it was that at the end of a few minutes Mr. Cashmore, on the sofa face to face with her, found his consciousness quite purged of its actual sense of his weakness and a new turn given to the idea of what, in one's very drawing-room, might go on behind one's back. Harold had quickly vanished—had been tacitly disposed
134
