Читать книгу The Awkward Age онлайн
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"Is ever so much the lovelier of the two? So I did. But you've promptly recognised 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 good 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 Nanda's appearance. 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 gaiety 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 presenting 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 footlights, 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 'attractions,' her possible share of good looks—is still to a degree in a fog. But everything depends on it."