Page:The Awkward Age (New York, Harper and Brothers, 1899).djvu/309

BOOK SEVENTH: MITCHY Nanda with a slow head-shake, covered him with one of the dimmest of her smiles. "You needn't say it. I know perfectly which it is." She held him an instant, after which she went on: "It's simply that you wish me fully to understand that you're one who, in perfect sincerity, doesn't mind one straw how awful—"

"Yes, how awful? He had kindled, as she paused, with his new eagerness.

"Well, one's knowledge may be. It doesn't shock in you a single hereditary prejudice."

"Oh, 'hereditary!'—" Mitchy ecstatically murmured.

"You even rather like me the better for it; so that one of the reasons why you couldn't have told me—though not, of course, I know, the only one—is that you would have been literally almost ashamed. Because, you know," she went on, "it is strange."

"My lack of hereditary—?"

"Yes, discomfort in the presence of the fact I speak of. There's a kind of sense you don't possess."

His appreciation again fairly goggled at her. "Oh, you do know everything!"

"You're so good that nothing shocks you," she lucidly persisted. "There's a kind of delicacy you haven't got."

He was more and more struck. "I've only that—as it were—of the skin and the fingers?" he appealed.

"Oh, and that of the mind. And that of the soul. And some other kinds, certainly. But not the kind."

"Yes"—he wondered—"I suppose that's the only way one can name it." It appeared to rise there before him. "The kind!"

"The kind that would make me painful to you. Or rather not me perhaps," she added as if to create between them the fullest possible light; "but my situation, my exposure—all the results of them that I show. Doesn't one become a sort of a little drain-pipe with everything flowing through?" 299