“Oh yes--no doubt; it’s a big subject.” She appeared to wish to meet him on everything reasonable. “Even Mr. Longdon admits that.” Vanderbank wondered. “You mean you talk over with him--!” “The subject of girls? Why we scarcely discuss anything else.” “Oh no wonder then you’re not bored. But you mean,” he asked, “that he recognises the inevitable change--?” “He can’t shut his eyes to the facts. He sees we’re quite a different thing.” “I dare say”--her friend was fully appreciative. “Yet the old thing--what do YOU know of it?” “I personally? Well, I’ve seen some change even in MY short life. And aren’t the old books full of us? Then Mr. Longdon himself has told me.” Vanderbank smoked and smoked. “You’ve gone into it with him?” “As far as a man and a woman can together.” As he took her in at this with a turn of his eye he might have had in his ears the echo of all the times it had been dropped in Buckingham Crescent that Nanda was “wonderful.” She WAS indeed. “Oh he’s of course on certain sides shy.” “Awfully--too beautifully. And then there’s Aggie,” the girl pursued. “I mean for the real old thing.” “Yes, no doubt--if she BE the real old thing. But what the deuce really IS Aggie?” “Well,” said Nanda with the frankest interest, “she’s a miracle. If one could be her exactly, absolutely, without the least little mite of change, one would probably be wise to close with it. Otherwise--except for anything BUT that--I’d rather brazen it out as myself.” There fell between them on this a silence of some minutes, after which it would probably not have been possible for either to say if their eyes had met while it lasted. This was at any rate not the case as Vanderbank at last remarked: “Your brass, my dear young lady, is pure gold!” “Then it’s of me, I think, that Harold ought to borrow.” “You mean therefore that mine isn’t?” Vanderbank went on. “Well, you really haven’t any natural ‘cheek’--not like SOME of them. You’re in yourself as uneasy, if anything’s said and every one giggles or makes some face, as Mr. Longdon, and if Lord Petherton hadn’t once told me that a man hates almost as much to be called modest as a woman does, I’d say that very often in London now you must pass some bad moments.” The present might precisely have been one of them, we should doubtless have gathered, had we seen fully recorded in Vanderbank’s face the degree to which this prompt response embarrassed or at least stupefied him. But he could always provisionally laugh. “I like your ‘in London now’!”