THE AWKWARD AGE
"Then it was open to him—"
"So he so strongly feels"—she quickly took him up—"that you must have felt. And therefore it is that I speak for him."
"Don't!" said Mr. Longdon.
"But I promised him I would."
"Don't!" the old man repeated.
She had kept, for the time, all her fine clearnesS turned to him; but she might on this have been taken as giving him up with a movement of obedience and strange soft sigh. The smothered sound might even have represented to a listener at all initiated a consenting retreat before an effort greater than her reckoning—a retreat that was in so far the snap of a sharp tension. The next minute, none the less, she evidently found a fresh provocation in the sight of the pale and positively excessive rigor she had imposed, so that, though her friend was only accommodating himself to her wish, she had a sudden impulse of criticism. "You're proud about it—too proud!"
"Well, what if I am?" He looked at her with a complexity of communication that no words could have meddled with. "Pride's all right when it helps one to bear things."
"Ah," said Nanda, "but that's only when one wants to take least from them. When one wants to take most—"
"Well?"—he spoke, as she faltered, with a certain small hardness of interest.
She faltered, however, indeed. "Oh, I don't know how to say it." She fairly colored with the attempt. "One must let the sense of all that I speak of—well, all come. One must rather like it. I don't know—but I suppose one must rather grovel."
Mr. Longdon, though with visible reluctance, turned it over. "That's very fine—but you're a woman."
450
