He again became mute, and there was a pause between them of some length, accepted by Nanda with an anxious stillness that it might have touched a spectator to observe. She sat there as if waiting for some further sign, only wanting not to displease her friend, yet unable to pretend to play any part and with something in her really that she couldn’t take back now, something involved in her original assumption that there was to be a kind of intelligence in their relation. “I dare say,” she said at last, “that I make allusions you don’t like. But I keep forgetting.” He waited a moment longer, then turned to her with a look rendered a trifle strange by the way it happened to reach over his glasses. It was even austerer than before. “Keep forgetting what?” She gave after an instant a faint feeble smile which seemed to speak of helplessness and which, when at rare moments it played in her face, was expressive from her positive lack of personal, superficial diffidence. “Well--I don’t know.” It was as if appearances became at times so complicated that--so far as helping others to understand was concerned--she could only give up. “I hope you don’t think I want you to be with me as you wouldn’t be--so to speak--with yourself. I hope you don’t think I don’t want you to be frank. If you were to try to APPEAR to me anything--!” He ended in simple sadness: that, for instance, would be so little what he should like. “Anything different, you mean, from what I am? That’s just what I’ve thought from the first. One’s just what one IS--isn’t one? I don’t mean so much,” she went on, “in one’s character or temper--for they have, haven’t they? to be what’s called ‘properly controlled’--as in one’s mind and what one sees and feels and the sort of thing one notices.” Nanda paused an instant; then “There you are!” she simply but rather desperately brought out. Mr. Longdon considered this with visible intensity. “What you suggest is that the things you speak of depend on other people?”