if it
were a question of their moving on the spot.

It literally made her smile, which, with a certain compunction, she
immediately corrected by doing for him in the pressure of her lips
to his cheek what he had just done for herself. "To-day?" she more
seriously asked.

He looked at his watch. "To-morrow."

She paused, but clearly for assent. "That's what I mean by your taking
me as I am. It IS, you know, for a girl--extraordinary."

"Oh I know what it is!" he exclaimed with an odd fatigue in his
tenderness.

But she continued, with the shadow of her scruple, to explain. "We're
many of us, we're most of us--as you long ago saw and showed you
felt--extraordinary now. We can't help it. It isn't really our fault.
There's so much else that's extraordinary that if we're in it all so
much we must naturally be." It was all obviously clearer to her than
ever yet, and her sense of it found renewed expression; so that she
might have been, as she wound up, a very much older person than her
friend. "Everything's different from what it used to be."

"Yes, everything," he returned with an air of final indoctrination.
"That's what he ought to have recognised."

"As YOU have?" Nanda was once more--and completely now--enthroned in
high justice. "Oh he's more old-fashioned than you."

"Much more," said Mr. Longdon with a queer face.

"He tried," the girl went on--"he did his best. But he couldn't. And
he's so right--for himself."

Her visitor, before meeting this, gathered in his hat and stick, which
for a minute occupied his attention. "He ought to have married--!"

"Little Aggie? Yes," said Nanda.

They had gained the door, where Mr. Longdon again met her eyes. "And
then Mitchy--!"

But she checked him with a quick gesture. "No--not even then!"

So again before he went they were for a minute confronted. "Are you
anxious about Mitchy?"

She faltered, but at last brought it out. "Yes. Do you see? There I am."

"I see. There we are. Well," said Mr. Longdon--"to-morrow."

End of the Project Gutenberg EBook of The Awkward Age, by Henry James

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