THE AWKWARD AGE
to reflect on his precipitation. "I see what Petherton's up to, and I won't, by drawing you aside just now, expose your niece to anything that might immediately oblige Mrs. Brook to catch her up and flee with her. But the first time I find you more isolated—well," he laughed, though not with the clearest ring, "all I can say is, mind your eyes, dear Duchess!"
"It's about your thinking, Jane," Mrs. Brookenham placidly explained, "that Nanda suffers—in her morals, don't you know?—by my neglect. I wouldn't say anything about you that I can't bravely say to you; therefore, since he has plumped out with it, I do confess that I've appealed to him on what, as so good an old friend, he thinks of your contention."
"What in the world is Jane's contention?" Edward Brookenham put the question as if they were "stuck" at cards.
"You really, all of you," the Duchess replied with excellent coolness, "choose extraordinary conditions for the discussion of delicate matters. There are decidedly too many things on which we don't feel alike. You're all inconceivable just now. Je ne peux pourtant pas la mettre à la porte, cette chérie"—whom she covered again with the gay solicitude that seemed to have in it a vibration of private entreaty: " Don't understand, my own darling—don't understand!"
Little Aggie looked around with an impartial politeness that, as an expression of the general blind sense of her being, in every particular, in hands at full liberty either to spot or to spare her, was touching enough to bring tears to all eyes. It perhaps had to do with the sudden emotion with which—using now quite a different manner—Mrs. Brookenham again embraced her, and even with this lady's equally abrupt and altogether wonderful address to her: "Between you and me straight, my dear, and as from friend to friend, I know that you'll
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