Page:The Awkward Age (New York, Harper and Brothers, 1899).djvu/308

THE AWKWARD AGE It produced for a little a hush between them, at the end of which her companion said with extraordinary gentleness and tenderness: "Dear old Nanda!" Her own silence appeared consciously to continue, and the suggestion of it might have been that for intelligent ears there was nothing to add to the declaration she had just made and which Mitchy sat there taking in as with a new light. What he drew from it indeed he presently went on to show. "You're too awfully interesting. Of course—you know a lot. How shouldn't you—and why?"

Why'? Oh, that's another affair! But you don't imagine what I know; I'm sure it's much more than you've a notion of. That's the kind of thing, now, one is—just except the little marvel of Aggie. What on earth," the girl pursued, "do you take us for?"

"Oh, it's all right!" breathed Mitchy, divinely pacific. "I'm sure I don't know whether it is; I shouldn't wonder if it were in fact all wrong. But what at least is certainly right is for one not to pretend anything else. There I am for you, at any rate. Now the beauty of Aggie is that she knows nothing—but absolutely, utterly: not the least little tittle of anything."

It was barely visible that Mitchy hesitated, and he spoke quite gravely. "Have you tried her?"

"Oh yes. And Tishy has." His gravity had been less than Nanda's. "Nothing, nothing." The memory some scene or some passage might have come back to her with a charm. "Ah, say what you will—it is the way we ought to be!"

Mitchy, after a minute of much intensity, had stopped watching her; changing his posture and with his elbows on his knees, he dropped for a while his face into his hands. Then he jerked himself to his feet. "There's something I wish awfully I could say to you. But I can't." 298