# The Awkward Age (New York: Harper and Brothers, 1899)/Book 1/Chapter 2

II
Mr. Longdon had gone to the place—little Nanda was in glazed white wood. He took her up and held her out; for a moment he said nothing, but presently, over his glasses, rested on his host a look intenser even than his ​scrutiny of the faded image. "Do they give their portraits now?"
"Little girls—innocent lambs? Surely, to old friends. Didn't they in your time?"
Mr. Longdon studied the portrait again; after which, with an exhalation of something between superiority and regret, "They never did to me," he replied.
"Well, you can have all you want now!" Vanderbank laughed.
His friend gave a slow, droll head-shake. "I don't want them 'now'!"
"You could do with them, my dear sir, still," Vanderbank continued in the same manner, "every bit I do!"
"I'm sure you do nothing you oughtn't." Mr. Longdon kept the photograph and continued to look at it. "Her mother told me about her—promised me I should see her next time."
"You must—she's a great friend of mine."
Mr. Longdon remained absorbed. "Is she clever?"
Vanderbank turned it over. "Well, you'll tell me if you think so."
"Ah, with a child of seventeen—!" Mr. Longdon murmured it as if in dread of having to pronounce. "This one, too, is seventeen?"
Vanderbank again considered. "Eighteen." He just hung fire once more, then brought out: "Well, call it nearly nineteen. I've kept her birthdays," he laughed.
His companion caught at the idea. "Upon my honor, I should like to! When is the next?"
"You've plenty of time—the fifteenth of June."
"I'm only too sorry to wait." Laying down the object he had been examining, Mr. Longdon took another turn about the room, and his manner was such an appeal to his host to accept his restlessness that, from the corner of a lounge, the latter watched him with encouragement. "I said to you just now that I knew the mothers, ​but it would have been more to the point to say the grandmothers." He stopped before the lounge, then nodded at the image of Nanda. "I knew hers. She put it at something less."
Vanderbank rather failed to understand. "The old lady? Put what?"
Mr. Longdon's face, for a moment, showed him as feeling his way. "I'm speaking of Mrs. Brookenham. She spoke of her daughter as only sixteen."
His companion's amusement at the tone of this broke out. "She usually does! She has done so, I think, for the last year or two."
Mr. Longdon dropped upon the lounge as if with the weight of something sudden and fresh; then, from where he sat, with a sharp little movement, tossed into the fire the end of his cigarette. Vanderbank offered him another, a second, and as he accepted it and took a light he said: "I don't know what you're doing with me—I never, at home, smoke so much!" But he puffed away and, seated so near him, laid his hand on Vanderbank's arm as if to help himself to utter something that was too delicate not to be guarded and yet too important not to be risked. "Now that's the sort of thing I did mean—as one of my impressions." Vanderbank continued at a loss, and he went on: "I refer—if you don't mind my saying so—to what you said just now."
Vanderbank was conscious of a deep desire to draw from him whatever might come; so sensible was it somehow that whatever in him was good was also thoroughly personal. But our young friend had to think a minute. "I see, I see. Nothing is more probable than that I've said something nasty; but which of my particular horrors—?"
"Well, then, your conveying that she makes her daughter out younger—"
"To make herself out the same?"—Vanderbank took ​him straight up. "It was nasty my doing that? I see, I see. Yes, yes: I rather gave her away, and you're struck by it—as is most delightful you should be—because you're, in every way, of a better tradition and, knowing Mrs. Brookenham's my friend, can't conceive of one's playing on a friend a trick so vulgar and odious. It strikes you also probably as the kind of thing we must be constantly doing; it strikes you that, right and left, probably, we keep giving each other away. Well, I dare say we do. Yes, 'come to think of it' as they say in America, we do. But what shall I tell you? Practically we all know it and allow for it, and it's as broad as it's long. What's London life after all? It's tit for tat!"
"Ah, but what becomes of friendship?" Mr. Longdon earnestly and pleadingly asked, while he still held Vanderbank's arm as if under the spell of the vivid explanation with which he had been furnished.
The young man met his eyes only the more sociably. "Friendship?"
"Friendship." Mr. Longdon maintained the full value of the word.
"Well," his companion risked, "I dare say it isn't in London by any means what it is at Beccles. I quite literally mean that," Vanderbank reassuringly added; "I never really have believed in the existence of friendship in big societies—in great towns and great crowds. It's a plant that takes time and space and air; and London society is a huge 'squash,' as we elegantly call it—an elbowing, pushing, perspiring, chattering mob."
"Ah, I don't say that of you!" Mr. Longdon murmured, with a withdrawal of his hand and a visible scruple for the sweeping concession he had evoked.
"Do say it, then—for God's sake; let some one say it, so that something or other, whatever it may be, may come of it! It's impossible to say too much—it's ​impossible to say enough. There isn't anything any one can say that I won't agree to."
"That shows you really don't care," the old man returned with acuteness.
"Oh, we're past saving, if that's what you mean!" Vanderbank laughed.
"You don't care, you don't care!" his visitor repeated, "and—if I may be frank with you—I shouldn't wonder if it were rather a pity."
"A pity I don't care?"
"You ought to, you ought to." Mr. Longdon paused. "May I say all I think?"
"I assure you I shall! You're awfully interesting."
"So are you, if you come to that. It's just what I've had in my head. There's something I seem to make out in you—!" He abruptly dropped this, however, going on in another way. "I remember the rest of you, but why did I never see you?"
"I must have been at school—at college. Perhaps you did know my brothers, elder and younger."
"There was a boy with your mother at Malvern. I was near her there for three months in—what was the year?"
"Yes, I know," Vanderbank replied while his guest tried to fix the date. "It was my brother Miles. He was awfully clever, but he had no health, poor chap, and we lost him at seventeen. She used to take houses at such places with him—it was supposed to be for his benefit."
Mr. Longdon listened with a visible recovery. "He used to talk to me—I remember he asked me questions I couldn't answer and made me dreadfully ashamed. But I lent him books—partly, upon my honor, to make him think that, as I had them, I did know something. He read everything and had a lot to say about it. I used to tell your mother he had a great future."
​Vanderbank shook his head sadly and kindly. "So he had. And you remember Nancy, who was handsome, and who was usually with them?" he went on.
Mr. Longdon looked so uncertain that he explained he meant his other sister; on which his companion said: "Oh, her? Yes, she was charming—she evidently had a future too."
"Well, she's in the midst of it now. She's married."
"And whom did she marry?"
"A fellow called Toovey. A man in the City."
"Oh!" said Mr. Longdon a little blankly. Then, as if to retrieve his blankness: "But why do you call her Nancy? Wasn't her name Blanche?"
"Exactly—Blanche Bertha Vanderbank."
Mr. Longdon looked half mystified and half distressed. "And now she's Nancy Toovey?"
Vanderbank broke into laughter at his dismay. "That's what every one calls her."
"But why?"
"Nobody knows. You see you were right about her future."
Mr. Longdon gave another of his soft, smothered sighs; he had turned back again to the first photograph, which he looked at for a longer time. "Well, it wasn't her way."
"My mother's? No indeed. Oh, my mother's way—!" Vanderbank waited, then added gravely: "She was taken in time."
Mr. Longdon turned half round and looked as if he were about to reply to this; but instead of so doing he proceeded afresh to an examination of the expressive oval in the red plush frame. He took up little Aggie, who appeared to interest him, and abruptly observed: "Nanda isn't so pretty."
"No, not nearly. There's a great question whether Nanda is pretty at all."
​Mr. Longdon continued to inspect her more favored friend; which led him after a moment to bring out: "She ought to be, you know. Her grandmother was."
"Oh, and her mother," Vanderbank threw in. "Don't you think Mrs. Brookenham lovely?"
Mr. Longdon kept him waiting a little. "Not so lovely as Lady Julia. Lady Julia had—" He faltered; then, as if there were too much to say, disposed of the question. "Lady Julia had everything."
Vanderbank gathered from the sound of the words an impression that determined him more and more to diplomacy. "But isn't that just what Mrs. Brookenham has?"
This time the old man was prompt. "Yes, she's very brilliant, but it's a totally different thing." He laid little Aggie down and moved away as if without a purpose; but Vanderbank presently perceived his purpose to be another glance at the other young lady. As if accidentally and absently, he bent again over the portrait of Nanda. "Lady Julia was exquisite, and this child's exactly like her."
Vanderbank, more and more conscious of something working in him, was more and more interested. "If Nanda's so like her, was she so exquisite?" he hazarded.
"Oh yes; every one was agreed about that." Mr. Longdon kept his eyes on the face, trying a little, Vanderbank even thought, to conceal his own. "She was one of the greatest beauties of her day."
"Then is Nanda so like her?" Vanderbank persisted, amused at his friend's transparency.
"Extraordinarily. Her mother told me all about her."
"Told you she's as beautiful as her grandmother?"
Mr. Longdon turned it over. "Well, that she has just Lady Julia's expression. She absolutely has it—I see it here." He was delightfully positive. "She's much more like the dead than like the living."
​Vanderbank saw in this too many deep things not to follow them up. One of these was, to begin with, that his friend had not more than half succumbed to Mrs. Brookenham's attraction, if indeed, by a fine originality, he had not resisted it altogether. That in itself, for an observer deeply versed in this lady, was delightful and beguiling. Another indication was that he found himself, in spite of such a break in the chain, distinctly predisposed to Nanda. "If she reproduces then so vividly Lady Julia," the young man threw out, "why does she strike you as so much less pretty than her foreign friend there, who is, after all, by no means a prodigy?"
The subject of this address, with one of the photographs in his hand, glanced, while he reflected, at the other. Then with a subtlety that matched itself for the moment with Vanderbank's: "You just told me yourself that the little foreign person—"
"Is ever so much the lovelier of the two? So I did. But you've promptly recognized it. It's the first time," Vanderbank went on, to let him down more gently, "that I've heard Mrs. Brookenham admit the girl's looks."
"Her own girl's? 'Admit' them?"
"I mean grant them to be even as good as they are. I myself, I must tell you, extremely like them. I think Lady Julia's granddaughter has in her face, in spite of everything—"
"What do you mean by everything?" Mr. Longdon broke in with such an approach to resentment that his host's amusement overflowed.
"You'll see—when you do see. She has no features. No, not one," Vanderbank inexorably pursued; "unless indeed you put it that she has two or three too many. What I was going to say was that she has in her expression all that's charming in her nature. But beauty, in London"—and, feeling that he held his visitor's ​attention, he gave himself the pleasure of freely unfolding his idea—"staring, glaring, obvious, knock-down, beauty, as plain as a poster on a wall, an advertisement of soap or whiskey, something that speaks to the crowd and crosses the foot-lights, fetches such a price in the market that the absence of it, for a woman with a girl to marry, inspires endless terrors and constitutes for the wretched pair—to speak of mother and daughter alone—a sort of social bankruptcy. London doesn't love the latent or the lurking, has neither time, nor taste, nor sense for anything less discernible than the red flag in front of the steam-roller. It wants cash over the counter and letters ten feet high. Therefore, you see, it's all, as yet, rather a dark question for poor Nanda—a question that, in a way, quite occupies the foreground of her mother's earnest little life. How will she look, what will be thought of her and what will she be able to do for herself? She's at the age when the whole thing—speaking of her appearance, her possible share of good looks—is still, in a manner, in a fog. But everything depends on it."
Mr. Longdon, by this time, had come back to him. "Excuse my asking it again—for you take such Jumps: what, once more, do you mean by everything?"
"Why, naturally, her marrying. Above all her marrying early."
Mr. Longdon stood before the sofa. "What do you mean by early?"
"Well, we do, doubtless, get up later than at Beccles; but that gives us, you see, shorter days. I mean in a couple of seasons. Soon enough," Vanderbank developed, "to limit the strain—" He broke down, in gayety, at his friend's expression.
"What do you mean by the strain?"
"Well, the complication of her being there."
"Being where?"
"You do put one through!" Vanderbank laughed. ​But he showed himself perfectly prepared. "Out of the school-room, where she is now. In her mother's drawing-room. At her mother's fireside."
Mr. Longdon stared. "But where else should she be?"
"At her husband's, don't you see?"
Mr. Longdon looked as if he quite saw, yet he was nevertheless, as regards his original challenge, not to be put off. "Ah, certainly," he replied with a slight stiffness, "but not as if she had been pushed down the chimney. All in good time."
Vanderbank turned the tables on him. "What do you call good time?"
"Why, time to make herself loved."
Vanderbank wondered. "By the men who come to the house?"
Mr. Longdon slightly attenuated this way of putting it. "Yes—and in the home circle. Where's the 'strain'—of her being suffered to be a member of it?"