Page:The Awkward Age (New York, Harper and Brothers, 1899).djvu/447

BOOK TENTH: NANDA "that I'm going to come to you henceforth for everything. But you're too wonderful," he wound up as she at first said nothing to this. "I don't even frighten you."

"Yes—fortunately for you."

"Ah, but I distinctly warn you that I mean to do my very best for it!"

Nanda viewed it all with as near an approach to gaiety as she often achieved. "Well, if you should ever succeed it would be a dark day for you."

"You bristle with your own guns," he pursued, "but the ingenuity of a lifetime shall be devoted to taking you on some quarter on which you're not prepared."

"And what quarter, pray, will that be?"

"Ah, I'm not such a fool as to begin by giving you a cue!" Mitchy, on this, turned off with an ambiguous but unmistakably natural sigh; he looked at photographs, he took up a book or two, as Vanderbank had done, and for a couple of minutes there was silence between them. "What does stretch before me," he resumed after an interval during which, clearly, in spite of his movements, he had looked at nothing—"what does stretch before me is the happy prospect of my feeling that I have found in you a friend with whom, so utterly and unreservedly, I can always go to the bottom of things. This luxury, you see, now, of our freedom to look facts in the face is one of which, I promise you, I mean fully to avail myself." He stopped before her again, and again she was silent. "It's so awfully jolly, isn't it? that there's not at last a single thing that we can't take our ease about. I mean that we can't intelligibly name and comfortably challenge. We've worked through the long tunnel of artificial reserves and superstitious mysteries, and I at least shall have only to feel that in showing every confidence and dotting every 'i' I follow the example you so admirably set. You go down to the roots? Good. It's all I ask!" 437