The Awkward Age by Henry James (best novel books to read .TXT) 📕

Mrs. Brook indeed appeared, after a pause and addressing herself again to Tishy, to give a reluctant illustration of it, coming back as from an excursion of the shortest to the question momentarily dropped. “I’m bound to say—all the more you know—that I don’t quite see what Aggie mayn’t now read.” Suddenly, however, her look at their informant took on an anxiety. “Is the book you speak of something VERY awful?”

Mrs. Grendon, with so much these past minutes to have made her so, was at last visibly more present. “That’s what Lord Petherton says of it. From what he knows of the author.”

“So that he wants to keep her—?”

“Well, from trying it first. I think he wants to see if it’s good for her.”

“That’s one of the most charming soins, I think,” the Duchess said, “that a gentleman may render a young woman to whom he desires to be useful. I won’t say that Petherton always knows how good a book may be, but I’d trust him any day to say how bad.”

Mr. Longdon, who had sat throughout silent and still, quitted his seat at this and evidently in so doing gave Mrs. Brook as much occasion as she required. She also got up and her movement brought to her view at the door of the further room something that drew from her a quick exclamation. “He can tell us now then—for here they come!” Lord Petherton, arriving with animation and followed so swiftly by his young companion that she presented herself as pursuing him, shook triumphantly over his head a small volume in blue paper. There was a general movement at the sight of them, and by the time they had rejoined their friends the company, pushing back seats and causing a variety of mute expression smoothly to circulate, was pretty well on its feet. “See— he HAS pulled her off!” said Mrs. Brook. “Little Aggie, to whom plenty of pearls were singularly becoming, met it as pleasant sympathy. Yes, and it was a REAL pull. But of course,” she continued with the prettiest humour and as if Mrs. Brook would quite understand, “from the moment one has a person’s nails, and almost his teeth, in one’s flesh—!”

Mrs. Brook’s sympathy passed, however, with no great ease from Aggie’s pearls to her other charms; fixing the former indeed so markedly that Harold had a quick word about it for Lady Fanny. “When poor mummy thinks, you know, that Nanda might have had them—!”

Lady Fanny’s attention, for that matter, had resisted them as little. “Well, I dare say that if I had wanted I might!”

“Lord—COULD you have stood him?” the young man returned. “But I believe women can stand anything!” he profoundly concluded. His mother meanwhile, recovering herself, had begun to ejaculate on the prints in Aggie’s arms, and he was then diverted from the sense of what he “personally,” as he would have said, couldn’t have stood, by a glance at Lord Petherton’s trophy, for which he made a prompt grab. “The bone of contention?” Lord Petherton had let it go and Harold remained arrested by the cover. “Why blest if it hasn’t Van’s name!”

“Van’s?”—his mother was near enough to effect her own snatch, after which she swiftly faced the proprietor of the volume. “Dear man, it’s the last thing you lent me! But I don’t think,” she added, turning to Tishy, “that I ever passed such a production on to YOU.”

“It was just seeing Mr. Van’s hand,” Aggie conscientiously explained, “that made me think one was free—!”

“But it isn’t Mr. Van’s hand!”—Mrs. Brook quite smiled at the error. She thrust the book straight at Mr. Longdon. “IS that Mr. Van’s hand?”

Holding the disputed object, which he had put on his nippers to glance at, he presently, without speaking, looked over these aids straight at Nanda, who looked as straight back at him. “It was I who wrote Mr. Van’s name.” The girl’s eyes were on Mr. Longdon, but her words as for the company. “I brought the book here from Buckingham Crescent and left it by accident in the other room.”

“By accident, my dear,” her mother replied, “I do quite hope. But what on earth did you bring it for? It’s too hideous.”

Nanda seemed to wonder. “Is it?” she murmured.

“Then you haven’t read it?”

She just hesitated. “One hardly knows now, I think, what is and what isn’t.”

“She brought it only for ME to read,” Tishy gravely interposed.

Mrs. Brook looked strange. “Nanda RECOMMENDED it?”

“Oh no—the contrary.” Tishy, as if scared by so much publicity, floundered a little. “She only told me—”

“The awful subject?” Mrs. Brook wailed.

There was so deepening an echo of the drollery of this last passage that it was a minute before Vanderbank could be heard saying: “The responsibility’s wholly mine for setting the beastly thing in motion. Still,” he added good-humouredly and as to minimise if not the cause at least the consequence, “I think I agree with Nanda that it’s no worse than anything else.”

Mrs. Brook had recovered the volume from Mr. Longdon’s relaxed hand and now, without another glance at it, held it behind her with an unusual air of firmness. “Oh how can you say that, my dear man, of anything so revolting?”

The discussion kept them for the instant well face to face. “Then did YOU read it?”

She debated, jerking the book into the nearest empty chair, where Mr. Cashmore quickly pounced on it. “Wasn’t it for that you brought it me?” she demanded. Yet before he could answer she again challenged her child. “Have you read this work, Nanda?”

“Yes mamma.”

“Oh I say!” cried Mr. Cashmore, hilarious and turning the leaves.

Mr. Longdon had by this time ceremoniously approached Tishy. “Good-night.”