Page:The Better Sort (New York, Charles Scribners Sons, 1903).djvu/169

FLICKERBRIDGE not sure that anything so terrible really ought to happen to you as to know us."

"Well," said Miss Wenham, "I do know you a little, by this time, don't I? And I don't find it terrible. It's a delightful change for me."

"Oh, I'm not sure you ought to have a delightful change!"

"Why not—if you do?"

"Ah, I can bear it. I'm not sure that you can. I'm too bad to spoil—I am spoiled. I'm nobody, in short; I'm nothing. I've no type. You're all type. It has taken long, delicious years of security and monotony to produce you. You fit your frame with a perfection only equalled by the perfection with which your frame fits you. So this admirable old house, all time-softened white within and time-faded red without, so everything that surrounds you here and that has, by some extraordinary mercy, escaped the inevitable fate of exploitation: so it all, I say, is the sort of thing that, if it were the least bit to fall to pieces, could never, ah, never more, be put together again. I have, dear Miss Wenham," Granger went on, happy himself in his extravagance, which was yet all sincere, and happier still in her deep, but altogether pleased, mystification—"I've found, do you know, just the thing one has ever heard of that you most resemble. You're the Sleeping Beauty in the wood."

He still had no compunction when he heard her bewilderedly sigh: "Oh, you're too delightfully droll!"

"No, I only put things just as they are, and as I've also learned a little, thank heaven, to see them—which isn't, I quite agree with you, at all what anyone does. You're in the deep doze of the spell that has held you for long years, and it would be a shame, a crime, to wake you up. Indeed I already feel, with a thousand scruples, that I'm giving you the fatal shake. I say it even though it makes me sound a little as if I thought myself the fairy prince." 157