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Awkward Age, The
BOOK FIFTH - THE DUCHESS   BOOK FIFTH - THE DUCHESS - CHAPTER II
Henry James
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       BOOK FIFTH - THE DUCHESS#CHAPTER II
       Nanda praised to the satellite so fantastically described the charming
       spot she had quitted, with the effect that they presently took fresh
       possession of it, finding the beauty of the view deepened as the
       afternoon grew old and the shadows long. They were of a comfortable
       agreement on these matters, by which moreover they were but little
       delayed, one of the pair at least being too conscious, for the hour, of
       still other phenomena than the natural and peaceful process that filled
       the air. "Well, you must tell me about these things," Mr. Longdon
       sociably said: he had joined his young friend with a budget of
       impressions rapidly gathered at the house; as to which his appeal to her
       for a light or two may be taken as the measure of the confidence now
       ruling their relations. He had come to feel at last, he mentioned, that
       he could allow for most differences; yet in such a situation as the
       present bewilderment could only come back. There were no differences in
       the world--so it had all ended for him--but those that marked at every
       turn the manners he had for three months been observing in good society.
       The general wide deviation of this body occupied his mind to the
       exclusion of almost everything else, and he had finally been brought to
       believe that even in his slow-paced prime he must have hung behind his
       contemporaries. He had not supposed at the moment--in the fifties and
       the sixties--that he passed for old-fashioned, but life couldn't have
       left him so far in the rear had the start between them originally been
       fair. This was the way he had more than once put the matter to the girl;
       which gives a sufficient hint, it is hoped, of the range of some of
       their talk. It had always wound up indeed, their talk, with some
       assumption of the growth of his actual understanding; but it was just
       these pauses in the fray that seemed to lead from time to time to a
       sharper clash. It was apt to be when he felt as if he had exhausted
       surprises that he really received his greatest shocks. There were no
       such queer-tasting draughts as some of those yielded by the bucket that
       had repeatedly, as he imagined, touched the bottom of the well. "Now
       this sudden invasion of somebody's--heaven knows whose--house, and our
       dropping down on it like a swarm of locusts: I dare say it isn't civil
       to criticise it when one's going too, so almost culpably, with the
       stream; but what are people made of that they consent, just for money,
       to the violation of their homes?"
       Nanda wondered; she cultivated the sense of his making her intensely
       reflect, "But haven't people in England always let their places?"
       "If we're a nation of shopkeepers, you mean, it can't date, on the scale
       on which we show it, only from last week? No doubt, no doubt, and the
       more one thinks of it the more one seems to see that society--for we're
       IN society, aren't we, and that's our horizon?--can never have been
       anything but increasingly vulgar. The point is that in the twilight of
       time--and I belong, you see, to the twilight--it had made out much less
       how vulgar it COULD be. It did its best very probably, but there were
       too many superstitions it had to get rid of. It has been throwing them
       overboard one by one, so that now the ship sails uncommonly light.
       That's the way"--and with his eyes on the golden distance he ingeniously
       followed it out--"I come to feel so the lurching and pitching. If I
       weren't a pretty fair sailor--well, as it is, my dear," he interrupted
       himself with a laugh, "I show you often enough what grabs I make for
       support." He gave a faint gasp, half amusement, half anguish, then
       abruptly relieved himself by a question. "To whom in point of fact does
       the place belong?"
       "I'm awfully ashamed, but I'm afraid I don't know. That just came up
       here," the girl went on, "for Mr. Van."
       Mr. Longdon seemed to think an instant. "Oh it came up, did it? And Mr.
       Van couldn't tell?"
       "He has quite forgotten--though he has been here before. Of course it
       may have been with other people," she added in extenuation. "I mean it
       mayn't have been theirs then any more than it's Mitchy's."
       "I see. They too had just bundled in."
       Nanda completed the simple history. "To-day it's Mitchy who bundles, and
       I believe that really he bundled only yesterday. He turned in his people
       and here we are."
       "Here we are, here we are!" her friend more gravely echoed. "Well, it's
       splendid!"
       As if at a note in his voice her eyes, while his own still strayed away,
       just fixed him. "Don't you think it's really rather exciting?
       Everything's ready, the feast all spread, and with nothing to blunt our
       curiosity but the general knowledge that there will be people and
       things--with nothing but that we comfortably take our places." He
       answered nothing, though her picture apparently reached him. "There ARE
       people, there ARE things, and all in a plenty. Had every one, when you
       came away, turned up?" she asked as he was still silent.
       "I dare say. There were some ladies and gentlemen on the terrace whom I
       didn't know. But I looked only for you and came this way on an
       indication of your mother's."
       "And did she ask that if you should find me with Mr. Van you'd make him
       come to her?"
       Mr. Longdon replied to this with some delay and without movement. "How
       could she have supposed he was here?"
       "Since he had not yet been to the house? Oh it has always been a wonder
       to me, the things that mamma supposes! I see she asked you," Nanda
       insisted.
       At this her old friend turned to her. "But it wasn't because of that I
       got rid of him."
       She had a pause. "No--you don't mind everything mamma says."
       "I don't mind 'everything' anybody says: not even, my dear, when the
       person's you."
       Again she waited an instant. "Not even when it's Mr. Van?"
       Mr. Longdon candidly considered. "Oh I take him up on all sorts of
       things."
       "That shows then the importance they have for you. Is HE like his
       grandmother?" the girl pursued. Then as her companion looked vague:
       "Wasn't it his grandmother too you knew?"
       He had an extraordinary smile. "His mother."
       She exclaimed, colouring, on her mistake, and he added: "I'm not so bad
       as that. But you're none of you like them."
       "Wasn't she pretty?" Nanda asked.
       "Very handsome. But it makes no difference. She herself to-day wouldn't
       know him."
       She gave a small gasp. "His own mother wouldn't--?"
       His headshake just failed of sharpness. "No, nor he her. There's a link
       missing." Then as if after all she might take him too seriously, "Of
       course it's I," he more gently moralised, "who have lost the link in my
       sleep. I've slept half the century--I'm Rip Van Winkle." He went back
       after a moment to her question. "He's not at any rate like his
       mother."
       She turned it over. "Perhaps you wouldn't think so much of her now."
       "Perhaps not. At all events my snatching you from Mr. Vanderbank was my
       own idea."
       "I wasn't thinking," Nanda said, "of your snatching me. I was thinking
       of your snatching yourself."
       "I might have sent YOU to the house? Well," Mr. Longdon replied, "I
       find I take more and more the economical view of my pleasures. I run
       them less and less together. I get all I can out of each."
       "So now you're getting all you can out of ME?"
       "All I can, my dear--all I can." He watched a little the flushed
       distance, then mildly broke out: "It IS, as you said just now, exciting!
       But it makes me"--and he became abrupt again--"want you, as I've already
       told you, to come to MY place. Not, however, that we may be still more
       mad together."
       The girl shared from the bench his contemplation. "Do you call THIS
       madness?"
       Well, he rather stuck to it. "You spoke of it yourself as excitement.
       You'll make of course one of your fine distinctions, but I take it in my
       rough way as a whirl. We're going round and round." In a minute he had
       folded his arms with the same closeness Vanderbank had used--in a
       minute he too was nervously shaking his foot. "Steady, steady; if we
       sit close we shall see it through. But come down to Suffolk for sanity."
       "You do mean then that I may come alone?"
       "I won't receive you, I assure you, on any other terms. I want to show
       you," he continued, "what life CAN give. Not of course," he subjoined,
       "of this sort of thing."
       "No--you've told me. Of peace."
       "Of peace," said Mr. Longdon. "Oh you don't know--you haven't the least
       idea. That's just why I want to show you."
       Nanda looked as if already she saw it in the distance. "But will it be
       peace if I'm there? I mean for YOU," she added.
       "It isn't a question of 'me.' Everybody's omelet is made of somebody's
       eggs. Besides, I think that when we're alone together--!"
       He had dropped for so long that she wondered. "Well, when we are--?"
       "Why, it will be all right," he simply concluded. "Temples of peace, the
       ancients used to call them. We'll set up one, and I shall be at least
       doorkeeper. You'll come down whenever you like."
       She gave herself to him in her silence more than she could have done in
       words. "Have you arranged it with mamma?" she said, however, at last.
       "I've arranged everything."
       "SHE won't want to come?"
       Her friend's laugh turned him to her. "Don't be nervous. There are
       things as to which your mother trusts me."
       "But others as to which not."
       Their eyes met for some time on this, and it ended in his saying: "Well,
       you must help me." Nanda, but without shrinking, looked away again, and
       Mr. Longdon, as if to consecrate their understanding by the air of ease,
       passed to another subject. "Mr. Mitchett's the most princely host."
       "Isn't he too kind for anything? Do you know what he pretends?" Nanda
       went on. "He says in the most extraordinary way that he does it all for
       ME."
       "Takes this great place and fills it with servants and company--?"
       "Yes, just so that I may come down for a Sunday or two. Of course he has
       only taken it for three or four weeks, but even for that time it's a
       handsome compliment. He doesn't care what he does. It's his way of
       amusing himself. He amuses himself at our expense," the girl continued.
       "Well, I hope that makes up, my dear, for the rate at which we're doing
       so at his!"
       "His amusement," said Nanda, "is to see us believe what he says."
       Mr. Longdon thought a moment. "Really, my child, you're most acute."
       "Oh I haven't watched life for nothing! Mitchy doesn't care," she
       repeated.
       Her companion seemed divided between a desire to draw and a certain fear
       to encourage her. "Doesn't care for what?"
       She considered an instant, all coherently, and it might have added to
       Mr. Longdon's impression of her depth. "Well, for himself. I mean for
       his money. For anything any one may think. For Lord Petherton, for
       instance, really at all. Lord Petherton thinks he has helped him--
       thinks, that is, that Mitchy thinks he has. But Mitchy's more amused at
       HIM than at anybody else. He takes every one in."
       "Every one but you?"
       "Oh I like him."
       "My poor child, you're of a profundity!" Mr. Longdon murmured.
       He spoke almost uneasily, but she was not too much alarmed to continue
       lucid. "And he likes me, and I know just how much--and just how little.
       He's the most generous man in the world. It pleases him to feel that
       he's indifferent and splendid--there are so many things it makes up to
       him for." The old man listened with attention, and his young frien
       conscious of it, proceeded as on ground of which she knew every inch.
       "He's the son, as you know, of a great bootmaker--'to all the Courts of
       Europe'--who left him a large fortune, which had been made, I believe,
       in the most extraordinary way, by building-speculations as well."
       "Oh yes, I know. It's astonishing!" her companion sighed.
       "That he should be of such extraction?"
       "Well, everything. That you should be talking as you are--that you
       should have 'watched life,' as you say, to such purpose. That we should
       any of us be here--most of all that Mr. Mitchett himself should. That
       your grandmother's daughter should have brought HER daughter--"
       "To stay with a person"--Nanda took it up as, apparently out of
       delicacy, he fairly failed--"whose father used to take the measure, down
       on his knees on a little mat, as mamma says, of my grandfather's
       remarkably large foot? Yes, we none of us mind. Do you think we should?"
       Nanda asked.
       Mr. Longdon turned it over. "I'll answer you by a question. Would you
       marry him?"
       "Never." Then as if to show there was no weakness in her mildness,
       "Never, never, never," she repeated.
       "And yet I dare say you know--?" But Mr. Longdon once more faltered; his
       scruple came uppermost. "You don't mind my speaking of it?"
       "Of his thinking he wants to marry me? Not a bit. I positively enjoy
       telling you there's nothing in it."
       "Not even for HIM?"
       Nanda considered. "Not more than is made up to him by his having found
       out through talks and things--which mightn't otherwise have occurred--
       that I do like him. I wouldn't have come down here if I hadn't liked
       him."
       "Not for any other reason?"--Mr. Longdon put it gravely.
       "Not for YOUR being here, do you mean?"
       He delayed. "Me and other persons."
       She showed somehow that she wouldn't flinch. "You weren't asked till
       after he had made sure I'd come. We've become, you and I," she smiled,
       "one of the couples who are invited together."
       These were couples, his speculative eye seemed to show, he didn't even
       yet know about, and if he mentally took them up a moment it was all
       promptly to drop them. "I don't think you state it quite strongly
       enough, you know."
       "That Mitchy IS hard hit? He states it so strongly himself that it will
       surely do for both of us. I'm a part of what I just spoke of--his
       indifference and magnificence. It's as if he could only afford to do
       what's not vulgar. He might perfectly marry a duke's daughter, but that
       WOULD be vulgar--would be the absolute necessity and ideal of nine out
       of ten of the sons of shoemakers made ambitious by riches. Mitchy says
       'No; I take my own line; I go in for a beggar-maid.' And it's only
       because I'm a beggar-maid that he wants me."
       "But there are plenty of other beggar-maids," Mr. Longdon objected.
       "Oh I admit I'm the one he least dislikes. But if I had any money,"
       Nanda went on, "or if I were really good-looking--for that to-day, the
       real thing, will do as well as being a duke's daughter--he wouldn't come
       near me. And I think that ought to settle it. Besides, he must marry
       Aggie. She's a beggar-maid too--as well as an angel. So there's nothing
       against it."
       Mr. Longdon stared, but even in his surprise seemed to take from the
       swiftness with which she made him move over the ground a certain
       agreeable glow. "Does 'Aggie' like him?"
       "She likes every one. As I say, she's an angel--but a real, real, real
       one. The kindest man in the world's therefore the proper husband for
       her. If Mitchy wants to do something thoroughly nice," she declared with
       the same high competence, "he'll take her out of her situation, which is
       awful."
       Mr. Longdon looked graver. "In what way awful?"
       "Why, don't you know?" His eye was now cold enough to give her, in her
       chill, a flurried sense that she might displease him least by a graceful
       lightness. "The Duchess and Lord Petherton are like you and me."
       "Is it a conundrum?" He was serious indeed.
       "They're one of the couples who are invited together." But his face
       reflected so little success for her levity that it was in another tone
       she presently added: "Mitchy really oughtn't." Her friend, in silence,
       fixed his eyes on the ground; an attitude in which there was something
       to make her strike rather wild. "But of course, kind as he is, he can
       scarcely be called particular. He has his ideas--he thinks nothing
       matters. He says we've all come to a pass that's the end of everything."
       Mr. Longdon remained mute a while, and when he at last, raised his eyes
       it was without meeting Nanda's and with some dryness of manner. "The end
       of everything? One might easily receive that impression."
       He again became mute, and there was a pause between them of some length,
       accepted by Nanda with an anxious stillness that it might have touched a
       spectator to observe. She sat there as if waiting for some further sign,
       only wanting not to displease her friend, yet unable to pretend to play
       any part and with something in her really that she couldn't take back
       now, something involved in her original assumption that there was to be
       a kind of intelligence in their relation. "I dare say," she said at
       last, "that I make allusions you don't like. But I keep forgetting."
       He waited a moment longer, then turned to her with a look rendered a
       trifle strange by the way it happened to reach over his glasses. It was
       even austerer than before. "Keep forgetting what?"
       She gave after an instant a faint feeble smile which seemed to speak of
       helplessness and which, when at rare moments it played in her face, was
       expressive from her positive lack of personal, superficial diffidence.
       "Well--I don't know." It was as if appearances became at times so
       complicated that--so far as helping others to understand was concerned--
       she could only give up.
       "I hope you don't think I want you to be with me as you wouldn't be--so
       to speak--with yourself. I hope you don't think I don't want you to be
       frank. If you were to try to APPEAR to me anything--!" He ended in
       simple sadness: that, for instance, would be so little what he should
       like.
       "Anything different, you mean, from what I am? That's just what I've
       thought from the first. One's just what one IS--isn't one? I don't mean
       so much," she went on, "in one's character or temper--for they have,
       haven't they? to be what's called 'properly controlled'--as in one's
       mind and what one sees and feels and the sort of thing one notices."
       Nanda paused an instant; then "There you are!" she simply but rather
       desperately brought out.
       Mr. Longdon considered this with visible intensity. "What you suggest is
       that the things you speak of depend on other people?"
       "Well, every one isn't so beautiful as you." She had met him with
       promptitude, yet no sooner had she spoken than she appeared again to
       encounter a difficulty. "But there it is--my just saying even that. Oh
       how I always know--as I've told you before--whenever I'm different! I
       can't ask you to tell me the things Granny WOULD have said, because
       that's simply arranging to keep myself back from you, and so being nasty
       and underhand, which you naturally don't want, nor I either.
       Nevertheless when I say the things she wouldn't, then I put before you
       too much--too much for your liking it--what I know and see and feel. If
       we're both partly the result of other people, HER other people were so
       different." The girl's sensitive boldness kept it up, but there was
       something in her that pleaded for patience. "And yet if she had YOU, so
       I've got you too. It's the flattery of that, or the sound of it, I know,
       that must be so unlike her. Of course it's awfully like mother; yet it
       isn't as if you hadn't already let me see--is it?--that you don't
       really think me the same." Again she stopped a minute, as to find her
       scarce possible way with him, and again for the time he gave no sign.
       She struck out once more with her strange cool limpidity. "Granny wasn't
       the kind of girl she COULDN't be--and so neither am I."
       Mr. Longdon had fallen while she talked into something that might have
       been taken for a conscious temporary submission to her; he had uncrossed
       his fidgety legs and, thrusting them out with the feet together, sat
       looking very hard before him, his chin sunk on his breast and his hands,
       clasped as they met, rapidly twirling their thumbs. So he remained for a
       time that might have given his young friend the sense of having made
       herself right for him so far as she had been wrong. He still had all her
       attention, just as previously she had had his, but, while he now simply
       gazed and thought, she watched him with a discreet solicitude that would
       almost have represented him as a near relative whom she supposed unwell.
       At the end he looked round, and then, obeying some impulse that had
       gathered in her while they sat mute, she put out to him the tender hand
       she might have offered to a sick child. They had been talking about
       frankness, but she showed a frankness in this instance that made him
       perceptibly colour. To that in turn, however, he responded only the more
       completely, taking her hand and holding it, keeping it a long minute
       during which their eyes met and something seemed to clear up that had
       been too obscure to be dispelled by words. Finally he brought out as if,
       though it was what he had been thinking of, her gesture had most
       determined him: "I wish immensely you'd get married!"
       His tone betrayed so special a meaning that the words had a sound of
       suddenness; yet there was always in Nanda's face that odd preparedness
       of the young person who has unlearned surprise through the habit, in
       company, of studiously not compromising her innocence by blinking at
       things said. "How CAN I?" she asked, but appearing rather to take up the
       proposal than to put it by.
       "Can't you, CAN'T you?" He spoke pressingly and kept her hand. She shook
       her head slowly, markedly; on which he continued: "You don't do justice
       to Mr. Mitchy." She said nothing, but her look was there and it made him
       resume: "Impossible?"
       "Impossible." At this, letting her go, Mr. Longden got up; he pulled out
       his watch. "We must go back." She had risen with him and they stood face
       to face in the faded light while he slipped the watch away. "Well, that
       doesn't make me wish it any less."
       "It's lovely of you to wish it, but I shall be one of the people who
       don't. I shall be at the end," said Nanda, "one of those who haven't."
       "No, my child," he returned gravely--"you shall never be anything so
       sad."
       "Why not--if YOU'VE been?" He looked at her a little, quietly, and then,
       putting out his hand, passed her own into his arm. "Exactly because I
       have."
       Content of BOOK FIFTH - THE DUCHESS: CHAPTER II [Henry James' novel: The Awkward Age]
       _
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PREFACE
BOOK FIRST - LADY JULIA
   BOOK FIRST - LADY JULIA - CHAPTER I
   BOOK FIRST - LADY JULIA - CHAPTER II
   BOOK FIRST - LADY JULIA - CHAPTER III
BOOK SECOND - LITTLE AGGIE
   BOOK SECOND - LITTLE AGGIE - CHAPTER I
   BOOK SECOND - LITTLE AGGIE - CHAPTER II
   BOOK SECOND - LITTLE AGGIE - CHAPTER III
   BOOK SECOND - LITTLE AGGIE - CHAPTER IV
   BOOK SECOND - LITTLE AGGIE - CHAPTER V
   BOOK SECOND - LITTLE AGGIE - CHAPTER VI
BOOK THIRD - MR. LONGDON
   BOOK THIRD - MR. LONGDON - CHAPTER I
   BOOK THIRD - MR. LONGDON - CHAPTER II
   BOOK THIRD - MR. LONGDON - CHAPTER III
BOOK FOURTH - MR. CASHMORE
   BOOK FOURTH - MR. CASHMORE - CHAPTER I
   BOOK FOURTH - MR. CASHMORE - CHAPTER II
   BOOK FOURTH - MR. CASHMORE - CHAPTER III
BOOK FIFTH - THE DUCHESS
   BOOK FIFTH - THE DUCHESS - CHAPTER I
   BOOK FIFTH - THE DUCHESS - CHAPTER II
   BOOK FIFTH - THE DUCHESS - CHAPTER III
   BOOK FIFTH - THE DUCHESS - CHAPTER IV
   BOOK FIFTH - THE DUCHESS - CHAPTER V
BOOK SIXTH - MRS. BROOK
   BOOK SIXTH - MRS. BROOK - CHAPTER I
   BOOK SIXTH - MRS. BROOK - CHAPTER II
   BOOK SIXTH - MRS. BROOK - CHAPTER III
BOOK SEVENTH - MITCHY
   BOOK SEVENTH - MITCHY - CHAPTER I
   BOOK SEVENTH - MITCHY - CHAPTER II
   BOOK SEVENTH - MITCHY - CHAPTER III
BOOK EIGHTH - TISHY GRENDON
   BOOK EIGHTH - TISHY GRENDON - CHAPTER I
   BOOK EIGHTH - TISHY GRENDON - CHAPTER II
   BOOK EIGHTH - TISHY GRENDON - CHAPTER III
   BOOK EIGHTH - TISHY GRENDON - CHAPTER IV
BOOK NINTH - VANDERBANK
   BOOK NINTH - VANDERBANK - CHAPTER I
   BOOK NINTH - VANDERBANK - CHAPTER II
   BOOK NINTH - VANDERBANK - CHAPTER III
   BOOK NINTH - VANDERBANK - CHAPTER IV
BOOK TENTH - NANDA
   BOOK TENTH - NANDA - CHAPTER I
   BOOK TENTH - NANDA - CHAPTER II
   BOOK TENTH - NANDA - CHAPTER III
   BOOK TENTH - NANDA - CHAPTER IV