THE AWKWARD AGE
what I know and see and feel. If we're both partly the result of other people, her other people were so different." The girl's sensitive boldness kept it up, but there was something in her that pleaded for patience. "And yet if she had you, so I've got you too. It's the flattery of that, or the sound of it, I know, that must be so unlike her. Of course it's awfully like mother; yet it isn't as if you hadn't already let me see—is it?—that you don't really think me the same." Again she stopped a minute, as if to find her way with him; and again, for the time, he gave no sign. She struck out again, with her strange, cool limpidity: "Granny wasn't the kind of girl she couldn't be—and so neither am I."
Mr. Longdon had fallen while she talked into something that might have been taken for a conscious temporary submission to her; he had uncrossed his fidgety legs and, thrusting them out with the feet together, sat looking very hard before him, his chin sunk on his breast and his hands, clasped as they met, rapidly twirling their thumbs. So he remained for a time that might have given his young friend the sense of having made herself right with him so far as she had been wrong. He still had all her attention, just as previously she had had his, but while he now simply gazed and thought she watched him with a discreet solicitude that would almost have represented him as a near relative whom she supposed unwell. At the end he looked round, and then, obeying some impulse that had gathered in her while they sat mute, she put out to him the tender hand she might have offered to a sick child. They had been talking about frankness, but she showed a frankness in this instance that made him perceptibly color. For that, in turn, however, he responded only the more completely, taking her hand and holding it, keeping it a long minute during which their eyes met and something seemed to clear up that had been too obscure to be dispelled by
192
