Page:The Awkward Age (New York, Harper and Brothers, 1899).djvu/310

THE AWKWARD AGE "Why don't you call it more gracefully," Mitchy asked, freshly struck, "a little æolian-harp set in the drawing-room window and vibrating in the breeze of conversation?"

"Oh, because the harp gives out a sound, and we—at least we try to—give out none."

"What you take, you mean, you keep?"

"Well, it sticks to us. And that's what you don't mind!"

Their eyes met long on it. "Yes—I see. I don't mind. I've the most extraordinary lacunæ."

"Oh, I don't know about others," Nanda replied; "I haven't noticed them. But you've that one, and it's enough."

He continued to face her with his queer mixture assent and speculation. "Enough, my dear, for what? To have made me impossible for you because the only man you could, as they say, have 'respected' would be a man who would have minded?" Then as under the cool, soft pressure of the question she looked at last away from him: "The man with 'the kind,' as you call it, happens to be just the type you can love? But what's the use," he persisted as she answered nothing, "in loving a person with the prejudice—hereditary or other—to which you're precisely obnoxious? Do you positively like to love in vain?"

It was a question, the way she turned back to him seemed to say, that deserved a responsible answer. "Yes."

But she had moved off after speaking, and Mitchy's eyes followed her to different parts of the room as, with small pretexts of present attention to it, small touches for symmetry, she slowly measured it. "What's extraordinary then is your idea of my finding any charm in Aggie's ignorance."

She immediately put down an old snuff-box. "Why, 300