THE AWKWARD AGE
Mitchy and his hostess seemed for a minute, on this, to gaze together at the tragic truth. Then she shook her head. "We see our mistakes too late." She repeated the movement, but as if to let it all go, and Vanderbank, meanwhile, pulling out his watch, had got up with a laugh that showed some inattention and made to Mitchy a remark about their walking away together. Mitchy, engaged for the instant with Mrs. Brook, had assented only with a nod, but the attitude of the two men had become that of departure. Their friend looked at them as if she would like to keep one of them, and for a purpose connected somehow with the other, but was oddly, almost ludicrously, embarrassed to choose. What was in her face indeed, during this short passage, might prove to have been, should we penetrate, the flicker of a sense that, in spite of all intimacy and amiability, they could, at bottom and as things commonly turned out, only be united against her. Yet she made at the end a sort of choice in going on to Mitchy: "He hasn't at all told you the real reason of Nanda's idea that you should go in for Aggie."
"Oh, I draw the line there," said Vanderbank. "Besides, he understands that too."
Mitchy did, on the spot, himself and every one justice. "Why, it just disposes of me, doesn't it?"
Vanderbank, restless now and turning about the room, stopped, on this, with a smile for Mrs. Brook. "We understand too well!"
"Not if he doesn't understand," she replied after a moment, while she turned to Mitchy, "that his real 'combination' can, in the nature of the case, only be—"
"Oh yes"—Mitchy took her straight up—"with the young thing who is, as you say, positively and helplessly modern, and the pious fraud of whose classic identity with a sheet of white paper has been—oh tacitly of course, but none the less practically—dropped. You've
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