THE AWKWARD AGE
wonderful idea of his variety. It was true indeed that Mr. Mitchett must have the most extraordinary understanding, and yet with Mr. Mitchett he now found himself quite pleasantly at his ease. Their host, however, was a person sui generis, whom he had accepted, once for all, the inconsequence of liking in pursuance of the need he occasionally felt to put it on record that he was not narrow-minded. Perhaps at bottom he most liked Mitchy because Mitchy most liked Nanda; there hung about him still, moreover, the faded fragrance of the superstition that hospitality not declined is one of the things that "oblige." It obliged the thoughts, for Mr. Longdon, as well as the manners, and, in the especial form in which he was now committed to it, would have made him, had he really thought any ill, ask himself what the deuce then he was doing in the man's house. All of which didn't prevent some of Mitchy's queer condonations—if condonations in fact they were—from not wholly, by themselves, soothing his vague unrest, an unrest which never had been so great as at the moment he heard the Duchess abruptly say to him: "Do you know my idea about Nanda? It's my particular desire that you should—the reason, really, why I've thus laid violent hands on you. Nanda, my dear man, should marry the very first moment."
This was more interesting than he had expected, and the effect produced by his interlocutress, and doubtless not lost on her, was shown in his suppressed start. "There has been no reason why I should attribute to you any judgment of the matter; but I've had one myself, and I don't see why I shouldn't say frankly that it's very much the one you express. It would be a very good thing."
"A very good thing, but none of my business?"—the Duchess's briskness was not unamiable.
It was on this circumstance that her companion for an
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