The Awkward Age

“I tried to, but I didn’t make it any better. He doesn’t like them. He doesn’t even care for Tish.”

“He told you so—right out?”

“Oh,” Nanda said, “of course I asked him. I didn’t press him, because I never do—!”

“You never do?” Mrs. Brook broke in as with the glimpse of a new light.

The girl showed an indulgence for this interest that was for a moment almost elderly. “I enjoy awfully with him seeing just how to take him.”

Her tone and her face evidently put forth for her companion at this juncture something freshly, even quite supremely suggestive; and yet the effect of them on Mrs. Brook’s part was only a question so off-hand that it might already often have been asked. The mother’s eyes, to ask it, we may none the less add, attached themselves closely to the daughter’s, and her face just glowed. “You like him so very awfully?”

It was as if the next instant Nanda felt herself on her guard. Yet she spoke with a certain surrender. “Well, it’s rather intoxicating to be one’s self—!” She had only a drop over the choice of her term.

“So tremendously made up to, you mean—even by a little fussy ancient man? But DOESN’T he, my dear,” Mrs. Brook continued with encouragement, “make up to you?”

A supposititious spectator would certainly on this have imagined in the girl’s face the delicate dawn of a sense that her mother had suddenly become vulgar, together with a general consciousness that the way to meet vulgarity was always to be frank and simple and above all to ignore. “He makes one enjoy being liked so much—liked better, I do think, than I’ve ever been liked by any one.”

If Mrs. Brook hesitated it was, however, clearly not because she had noticed. “Not better surely than by dear Mitchy? Or even if you come to that by Tishy herself.”

Nanda’s simplicity maintained itself. “Oh Mr. Longdon’s different from Tishy.”

Her mother again hesitated. “You mean of course he knows more?”

The girl considered it. “He doesn’t know MORE. But he knows other things. And he’s pleasanter than Mitchy.”

“You mean because he doesn’t want to marry you?”

It was as if she had not heard that Nanda continued: “Well, he’s more beautiful.”

“O-oh!” cried Mrs. Brook, with a drawn-out extravagance of comment that amounted to an impugnment of her taste even by herself.

It contributed to Nanda’s quietness. “He’s one of the most beautiful people in the world.”

Her companion at this, with a quick wonder, fixed her. “DOES he, my dear, want to marry you?”

“Yes—to all sorts of ridiculous people.”

“But I mean—would you take HIM?”

Nanda, rising, met the question with a short ironic “Yes!” that showed her first impatience. “It’s so charming being liked without being approved.”

But Mrs. Brook only wanted to know. “He doesn’t approve—?”

“No, but it makes no difference. It’s all exactly right—it doesn’t matter.”

Mrs. Brook seemed to wonder, however, exactly how these things could be. “He doesn’t want you to give up anything?” She looked as if swiftly thinking what Nanda MIGHT give up.

“Oh yes, everything.”

It was as if for an instant she found her daughter inscrutable; then she had a strange smile. “Me?”

The girl was perfectly prompt. “Everything. But he wouldn’t like me nearly so much if I really did.”

Her mother had a further pause. “Does he want to ADOPT you?” Then more quickly and sadly, though also a little as if lacking nerve to push the research: “We couldn’t give you up, Nanda.”

“Thank you so much, mamma. But we shan’t be very much tried,” Nanda said, “because what it comes to seems to be that I’m really what you may call adopting HIM. I mean I’m little by little changing him—gradually showing him that, as I couldn’t possibly have been different, and as also of course one can’t keep giving up, the only way is for him not to mind, and to take me just as I am. That, don’t you see? is what he would never have expected to do.”

Mrs. Brook recognised in a manner the explanation, but still had her wistfulness. “But—a—to take you, ‘as you are,’ WHERE?”

“Well, to the South Kensington Museum.”

“Oh!” said Mrs. Brook. Then, however, in a more exemplary tone: “Do you enjoy so very much your long hours with him?”

Nanda appeared for an instant to think how to express it. “Well, we’re great friends.”

“And always talking about Granny?”

“Oh no—really almost never now.”

“He doesn’t think so awfully much of her?” There was an oddity of eagerness in the question—a hope, a kind of dash, for something that might have been in Nanda’s interest.

The girl met these things only with obliging gravity. “I think he’s losing any sense of my likeness. He’s too used to it—or too many things that are too different now cover it up.”

“Well,” said Mrs. Brook as she took this in, “I think it’s awfully clever of you to get only the good of him and have none of the worry.”

Nanda wondered. “The worry?”

“You leave that all to ME,” her mother went on, but quite forgivingly. “I hope at any rate that the good, for you, will be real.”

“Real?” the girl, remaining vague, again echoed.

Mrs. Brook showed for this not perhaps an irritation, but a flicker of austerity. “You must remember we’ve a great many things to think about. There are things we must take for granted in each other—we must all help in our way to pull the coach. That’s what I mean by worry, and if you don’t have any so much the better for you. For me it’s in the day’s work. Your father and I have most to think about always at this time, as you perfectly know—when we have to turn things round and manage somehow or other to get out of town, have to provide and pinch, to meet all the necessities, with money, money, money at every turn running away like water. The children this year seem to fit into nothing, into nowhere, and Harold’s more dreadful than he has ever been, doing nothing at all for himself and requiring everything to be done for him. He talks about his American girl, with millions, who’s so awfully taken with him, but I can’t find out anything about her: the only one, just now, that people seem to have heard of is the one Booby Manger’s engaged to. The Mangers literally snap up everything,” Mrs. Brook quite wailingly now continued: “the Jew man, so gigantically rich—who is he? Baron Schack or Schmack—who has just taken Cumberland House and who has the awful stammer—or what is it? no roof to his mouth—is to give that horrid little Algie, to do his conversation for him, four hundred a year, which Harold pretended to me that, of all the rush of young men—dozens!—HE was most in the running for. Your father’s settled gloom is terrible, and I bear all the brunt of it; we get literally nothing this year for the Hovel, yet have to spend on it heaven knows what; and everybody, for the next three months, in Scotland and everywhere, has asked us for the wrong time and nobody for the right: so that I assure you I don’t know where to turn—which doesn’t however in the least prevent every one coming to me with their own selfish troubles.” It was as if Mrs. Brook had found the cup of her secret sorrows suddenly jostled by some touch of which the perversity, though not completely noted at the moment, proved, as she a little let herself go, sufficient to make it flow over; but she drew, the next thing, from her daughter’s stillness a reflexion of the vanity of such heat and speedily recovered herself as if in order with more dignity to point the moral. “I can carry my burden and shall do so to the end; but we must each remember that we shall fall to pieces if we don’t manage to keep hold of some little idea of responsibility. I positively can’t arrange without knowing when it is you go to him.”

“To Mr. Longdon? Oh whenever I like,” Nanda replied very gently and simply.

“And when shall you be so good as to like?”

“Well, he goes himself on Saturday, and if I want I can go a few days later.”

“And what day can you go if I want?” Mrs. Brook spoke as with a small sharpness—just softened indeed in time—produced by the sight of a freedom in her daughter’s life that suddenly loomed larger than any freedom of her own. It was still a part of the unsteadiness of the vessel of her anxieties; but she never after all remained publicly long subject to the influence she often comprehensively designated to others as well as to herself as “nastiness.” “What I mean is that you might go the same day, mightn’t you?”

“With him—in the train? I should think so if you wish it.”

“But would HE wish it? I mean would he hate it?”

“I don’t think so at all, but I can easily ask him.”

Mrs. Brook’s head inclined to the chimney and her eyes to the window. “Easily?”