The Awkward Age

I recall with perfect ease the idea in which “The Awkward Age” had its origin, but re-perusal gives me pause in respect to naming it. This composition, as it stands, makes, to m...

It comes back to me, the whole “job,” as wonderfully amusing and delightfully difficult from the first; since amusement deeply abides, I think, in any artistic attempt the basis...

One of these things was the lift in which, at no great pace and with much rumbling and creaking, the porter conveyed the two gentlemen to the alarming eminence, as Mr. Longdon m...

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.”

“I took your five pounds. Also two of the sovereigns,” he went on. “I left you two pound ten.” His mother jerked up her head at this, facing him in dismay, and, immediately on h...

“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, wi...

“SHE was all ready--yes. But I wasn’t. I am now,” Mrs. Brookenham, with a fine emphasis on her adverb, proclaimed as she turned to meet the opening of the door and the appearanc...

That young lady, in this relation, was certainly a figure to have offered a foundation for the highest hopes. As slight and white, as delicately lovely, as a gathered garden lil...

“For jealousy of that preposterous little person? My dear Mitchett,” the Duchess resumed after a moment’s reflexion, “if you’re so rash as to ask me in any of these connexions f...

“Yes, and it’s so I express them. I see them, I know, with a raccourci; but time after all rather presses, and at any rate we understand each other. What I want now is just to s...

“But it’s just that excess that, with the exquisite eyes and the particular disposition round it of the fair hair, makes the individual grace, makes the beauty of the resemblance.”

She shook her head with a world of accepted woe. “‘Give me back, give me back one hour of my youth’! Oh I haven’t a single thrill left to answer a compliment. I sit here now fac...

Of this observation Mrs. Brook, whose eyes attached themselves again to Mr. Longdon, took at first no further notice than might have been indicated by the way it set her musing.

Mrs. Brook meanwhile had given Mr. Longdon her hand. “Well, in any case the child SHALL soon come to you. And oh alone,” she insisted: “you needn’t make phrases--I know too well...

“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...

“Well, for whom?” he demanded as she stopped. It was her step that had checked itself as well as her tongue, and again, suddenly, they stood quite consciously and vividly oppose...

“If your question’s ironical,” she laughed, “your irony’s perfectly wasted. I should be ashamed of myself if, with my relationship and my interest, I hadn’t made sure. Nanda’s f...

If his friend seemed to cast about it proved but to be for the fullest expression. Nothing in fact could have been more charged than the quiet way in which he presently said: “M...

“Ah but there you are, don’t you see? Fancy ‘getting’ Mr. Longdon anything or anywhere whatever! Don’t you feel,” Vanderbank threw out, “how the impossibility of exerting that s...

She was indeed, as they always thought her, “wonderful,” but she was perhaps not even now so much so as Mitchy found himself able to be. “But how would you lose old Van--even at...

Her tone and her face evidently put forth for her companion at this juncture something freshly, even quite supremely suggestive; and yet the effect of them on Mrs. Brook’s part...

His amusement now dropped to her straighter. “Your ‘we’ is awfully beautiful. It’s charming to hear you speak for the whole lovely lot. Only you speak, you know, as if you were...

He continued to face her with his queer mixture of assent and speculation. “Enough for what, my dear? To have made me impossible for you because the only man you could, as they...

“Well, that it would be exactly--what do you call it?--‘square.’ Or even quite delicate or decent. To take from him, in the way of an assurance so handsomely offered, so much, a...

“Oh a thing in a blue cover? I remember then too.” Nanda’s face cleared up. “I had forgotten it was lying about here, but I must have brought it--in fact I remember I did--for T...

“That he fears I may want in any way to--what do you call it?--make up to him.” She spoke as if she only wished it had been. “He has a deeper thought.”

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 he...

“Isn’t as bad as what I do? Oh we must each do our best. But when I hear from you,” Mrs. Brook pursued, “that Nanda had ever permitted herself anything so dreadful as to wire to...

“Yes, that he’ll take from YOU. Only it’s for you,” Mrs. Brook went on, “really and honestly, and as I trust you, to give it. But the comfort of you is that you’ll do so if you...

Nanda Brookenham, for a fortnight after Mr. Longdon’s return, had found much to think of; but the bustle of business became, visibly for us, particularly great with her on a cer...

“Oh,” said Nanda very simply, “it isn’t a ‘career’ exactly, is it--keeping hold of an old friend? but it may console a little, mayn’t it, for the absence of one? At all events I...

“Oh but you see I reflect that though you show all the courage to go to the roots and depths with ME, I’m not--I never have been--fully conscious of the nerve for doing as much...

Mr. Longdon now got to his feet and somewhat stiffly remained; after which, for all answer, “You say you WILL come then?” he asked. Then as--seemingly with her last thought--she...