Page:The Awkward Age (New York, Harper and Brothers, 1899).djvu/454

THE AWKWARD AGE Mitchy looked with interest into his hat. "Then what is it I'm to 'leave' to you?" After which, as she turned away from him with a suppressed sound and said, while he watched her, nothing else, "It's no doubt natural for you to talk," he went on, "but I do make you nervous. Good-by—good-by."

She had stayed him, however, by a fresh movement, as he reached the door. "Aggie"s only trying to find out—"

"Yes—what?" he asked, waiting.

"Why, what sort of a person she is. How can she ever have known? It was carefully, elaborately hidden from her—kept so obscure that she could make out nothing. She isn't now like me."

He wonderingly attended. "Like you?"

"Why, I get the benefit of the fact that there was never a time when I didn't know something or other and that I became more and more aware, as I grew older, of a hundred little chinks of daylight."

Mitchy stared. "You're stupendous, my dear!" he murmured.

Ah, but she kept it up. "I had my idea about Aggie."

"Oh, don't I know you had? And how you were positive about the sort of person—"

"That she didn't even suspect herself," Nanda broke in, "to be? I'm equally positive now. It's quite what I believed, only there's ever so much more of it. More has come—and more will yet. You see, when there has been nothing before, it all has to come with a rush. So that if even I am surprised, of course she is."

"And of course I am!" Mitchy's interest, though even now not wholly unqualified with amusement, had visibly deepened. "You admit then," he continued, "that you are surprised?" 444