BOOK SECOND: LITTLE AGGIE
chair; her hands, in her lap, pressed themselves together, and her wan smile brought a tear into each of her eyes by the very effort to be brighter. It might have been guessed of her that she hated to seem to care, but that she had other dislikes too. "If one were to take up, you know, some of the things you say—!" And she positively sighed for the fulness of amusement at them of which her tears were the sign.
Her friend could quite match her indifference. "Well, my child, take them up; if you were to do that with them, candidly, one by one, you would do really very much what I should like to bring you to. Do you see?" Mrs. Brookenham's failure to repudiate the vision appeared to suffice, and her visitor cheerfully took a further jump. "As much of Tishy as she wants—after. But not before."
"After what?"
"Well—say after Mr. Mitchett. Mr. Mitchett won't take her after Mrs. Grendon."
"And what are your grounds for assuming that he'll take her at all?" Then as the Duchess hung fire a moment: "Have you got it by chance from Lord Petherton?"
The eyes of the two women met for a little on this, and there might have been a consequence of it in the manner of the rejoinder. "I've got it from not being a fool. Men, I repeat, like the girls they marry—"
"Oh, I already know your old song! The way they like the girls they don't marry seems to be," Mrs. Brookenham mused, "what more immediately concerns us. You had better wait till you have made Aggie's fortune, perhaps, to be so sure of the working of your system. Excuse me, darling, if I don't take you for an example until you've a little more successfully become one. The sort of men I know anything about, at any rate, are not looking for mechanical dolls. They're looking for smart, safe, sensible English girls."
51
