“He has got out of the way to give me a chance? Well then he’s as usual simply magnificent. How can I express the bliss of finding myself enclosed with you in this sweet old security, this really unimagined sanctity? Nothing’s more charming than suddenly to come across something sharp and fresh after we’ve thought there was nothing more that could draw from us a groan. We’ve supposed we’ve had it all, have squeezed the last impression out of the last disappointment, penetrated to the last familiarity in the last surprise; then some fine day we find that we haven’t done justice to life. There are little things that pop up and make us feel again. What MAY happen is after all incalculable. There’s just a little chuck of the dice, and for three minutes we win. These, my dear young lady, are my three minutes. You wouldn’t believe the amusement I get from them, and how can I possibly tell you? There’s a faint divine old fragrance here in the room--or doesn’t it perhaps reach you? I shan’t have lived without it, but I see now I had been afraid I should. You, on your side, won’t have lived without some touch of greatness. This moment’s great and you’ve produced it. You were great when you felt all you COULD produce. Therefore,” Mitchy went on, pausing once more, as he walked, before a picture, “I won’t pull the whole thing down by the vulgarity of wishing I too only had a first-rate Cotman.” “Have you given up some VERY big thing to come?” Nanda replied to this. “What in the world is very big, my child, but the beauty of this hour? I haven’t the least idea WHAT, when I got Mr. Longdon’s note, I gave up. Don’t ask me for an account of anything; everything went--became imperceptible. I WILL say that for myself: I shed my badness, I do forget people, with a facility that makes me, for bits, for little patches, so far as they’re concerned, cease to BE; so that my life is spotted all over with momentary states in which I’m as the dead of whom nothing’s said but good.” He had strolled toward her again while she smiled at him. “I’ve died for this, Nanda.” “The only difficulty I see,” she presently replied, “is that you ought to marry a woman really clever and that I’m not quite sure what there may be of that in Aggie.” “In Aggie?” her friend echoed very gently. “Is THAT what you’ve sent for me for--to talk about Aggie?” “Didn’t it occur to you it might be?” “That it couldn’t possibly, you mean, be anything else?” He looked about for the place in which it would express the deepest surrender to the scene to sit--then sank down with a beautiful prompt submission. “I’ve no idea of what occurred to me--nothing at least but the sense that I had occurred to YOU. The occurrence is clay in the hands of the potter. Do with me what you will.” “You appreciate everything so wonderfully,” Nanda said, “that it oughtn’t to be hard for you to appreciate HER. I do dream so you may save her. That’s why I haven’t waited.”