Henry James - The Awkward Age

The Duchess finished her mouthful imperturbably before she took this up. "Does he come so often?"

Mrs. Brookenham might have been, for judicious candour, the Muse of History. "I don't know what he calls it; but he said yesterday that he'd come today. I've had tea earlier for you," she went on with her most melancholy kindness—"and he's always late. But we mustn't, between us, lick the platter clean."

The Duchess entered very sufficiently into her companion's tone. "Oh I don't feel at all obliged to consider him, for he has not of late particularly put himself out for me. He has not been to see me since I don't know when, and the last time he did come he brought Mr. Mitchett."

"Here it was the other way round. It was Mr. Mitchett, the other year, who first brought Lord Petherton."

"And who," asked the Duchess, "had first brought Mr. Mitchett?"

Mrs. Brookenham, meeting her friend's eyes, looked for an instant as if trying to recall. "I give it up. I muddle beginnings."

"That doesn't matter if you only MAKE them," the Duchess smiled.

"No, does it?" To which Mrs. Brookenham added: "Did he bring Mr. Mitchett for Aggie?"

"If he did they'll have been disappointed. Neither of them has seen, in my house, the tip of her nose." The Duchess announced it with a pomp of pride.

"Ah but with your ideas that doesn't prevent."

"Prevent what?"

"Why what I suppose you call the pourparlers."

"For Aggie's hand? My dear," said the Duchess, "I'm glad you do me the justice of feeling that I'm a person to take time by the forelock. It was not, as you seem to remember, with the sight of Mr. Mitchett that the question of Aggie's hand began to occupy me. I should be ashamed of myself if it weren't constantly before me and if I hadn't my feelers out in more quarters than one. But I've not so much as thought of Mr. Mitchett—who, rich as he may be, is the son of a shoemaker and superlatively hideous—for a reason I don't at all mind telling you. Don't be outraged if I say that I've for a long time hoped you yourself would find the right use for him." She paused—at present with a momentary failure of assurance, from which she rallied, however, to proceed with a burst of earnestness that was fairly noble. "Forgive me if I just tell you once for all how it strikes me, I'm stupefied at your not seeming to recognise either your interest or your duty. Oh I know you want to, but you appear to me—in your perfect good faith of course —utterly at sea. They're one and the same thing, don't you make out? your interest and your duty. Why isn't it convincingly plain to you that the thing to do with Nanda is just to marry her—and to marry her soon? That's the great thing—do it while you CAN. If you don't want her downstairs—at which, let me say, I don't in the least wonder—your remedy is to take the right alternative. Don't send her to Tishy—"

"Send her to Mr. Mitchett?" Mrs. Brookenham unresentfully quavered. Her colour, during her visitor's address had distinctly risen, but there was no irritation in her voice. "How do you know, Jane, that I don't want her downstairs?"

The Duchess looked at her with an audacity confirmed by the absence from her face of everything but the plaintive. "There you are, with your eternal English false positions! J'aime, moi, les situations nettes—je rien comprends pas d'autres. It wouldn't be to your honour—to that of your delicacy—that with your impossible house you SHOULD wish to plant your girl in your drawing-room. But such a way of keeping her out of it as throwing her into a worse—!"

"Well, Jane, you do say things to me!" Mrs. Brookenham blandly broke in. She had sunk back into her 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 wealth 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 what came. "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. Pardon me, darling, if I don't take you for an example until you've a little more successfully become one. I know what the sort of men worth speaking of are not looking for. They ARE looking for smart safe sensible English girls."

The Duchess glanced at the clock. "What's Mr. Vanderbank looking for?"

Her companion appeared to oblige her by anxiously thinking. "Oh, HE, I'm afraid, poor dear—for nothing at all!"

The Duchess had taken off a glove to appease her appetite, and now, drawing it on, she smoothed it down. "I think he has his ideas."

"The same as yours?"

"Well, more like them than like yours."

"Ah perhaps then—for he and I," said Mrs. Brookenham, "don't agree, I feel, on two things in the world. So you think poor Mitchy," she went on, "who's the son of a shoemaker and who might be the grandson of a grasshopper, good enough for my child."

The Duchess appreciated for a moment the superior fit of her glove. "I look facts in the face. It's exactly what I'm doing for Aggie." Then she grew easy to extravagance. "What are you giving her?"

But Mrs. Brookenham took without wincing whatever, as between a masterful relative and an exposed frivolity, might have been the sting of it. "That you must ask Edward. I haven't the least idea."

"There you are again—the virtuous English mother! I've got Aggie's little fortune in an old stocking and I count it over every night. If you've no old stocking for Nanda there are worse fates than shoemakers and grasshoppers. Even WITH one, you know, I don't at all say that I should sniff at poor Mitchy. We must take what we can get and I shall be the first to take it. You can't have everything for ninepence." And the Duchess got up—shining, however, with a confessed light of fantasy. "Speak to him, my dear—speak to him!"

"Do you mean offer him my child?"

She laughed at the intonation. "There you are once more—vous autres! If you're shocked at the idea you place drolement your delicacy. I'd offer mine to the son of a chimney-sweep if the principal guarantees were there. Nanda's charming—you don't do her justice. I don't say Mr. Mitchett's either beautiful or noble, and he certainly hasn't as much distinction as would cover the point of a pin. He doesn't mind moreover what he says—the lengths he sometimes goes to!—but that," added the Duchess with decision, "is no doubt much a matter of how he finds you'll take it. And after marriage what does it signify? He has forty thousand a year, an excellent idea of how to take care of it and a good disposition."

Mrs. Brookenham sat still; she only looked up at her friend. "Is it by Lord Petherton that you know of his excellent idea?"