Page:Two Magics.djvu/273

Rh candidly replied, "to keep up—fairly to call it—with what you do say."

"That's just what everyone finds it!"—she broke into the happiest laugh. "Yet I haven't come here to suffer in silence, you know—to suffer, I mean, from envy and despair." She was in constant movement, from side to side, observing, comparing, returning, taking notes while she gossiped and gossiping, too, for remembrance. The intention of remembrance even had in it, however, some prevision of failure or some alloy of irritation. "You're so fatally right and so deadly complete, all the same, that I can really scarcely bear it: with every fascinating feature that I had already heard of and thought I was prepared for, and ever so many others that, strange to say, I hadn't and wasn't, and that you just spring right at me like a series of things going off. What do you call it," she asked—"a royal salute, a hundred guns?"

Her enthusiasm had a bewildering form, but it had by this time warmed the air, and the old man rubbed his hands as over a fire to which the bellows had been applied. "I saw as soon as you arrived, mum, that you were looking for more things than ever I heard tell of!"