THE AWKWARD AGE
Van took his time to answer. "I've still to decide." Mitchy became again, on this, in the sociable dusk, a slow-circling, vaguely agitated element, and his friend continued: "Is your idea very generously and handsomely to help that by letting me know—"
"That I do definitely renounce"—Mitchy took him—"any pretension and any hope? Well, I'm ready with a proof of it. I've passed my word that I'll apply elsewhere."
Vanderbank turned more round to him. "Apply to the Duchess for her niece?"
"It's practically settled."
"But since when?"
Mitchy barely faltered. "Since this afternoon."
"Ah then, not with the Duchess herself."
"With Nanda—whose plan, from the first, you won't have forgotten, the thing has so charmingly been."
Vanderbank could show that his not having in the least forgotten was yet not a bar to his being now mystified. "But, my dear man, what can Nanda 'settle'?"
"My fate," Mitchy said, pausing well before him.
Vanderbank sat now a minute with raised eyes, catching the indistinctness of his friend's strange expression.
"You're both beyond me!" he exclaimed at last, "I don't see what you, in particular, gain."
"I didn't either till she made it all out to me. One sees then, in such a matter, for one's self. And as everything's gain that isn't loss, there was nothing I could lose. It gets me," Mitchy further explained, "out of the way."
"Out of the way of what?"
This, Mitchy frankly showed, was more difficult to say, but he in time brought it out. "Well, of appearing to suggest to you that my existence, in a prolonged state of singleness, may ever represent for her any real alternative."
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