It was only for an instant, however, that this objection seemed to tell. “That’s exactly why she’ll be so perfect for you. You’ll get her away--take her out of her aunt’s life.” Mitchy met it all now in a sort of spellbound stillness. “What do you know about her aunt’s life?” “Oh I know everything!” She spoke with her first faint shade of impatience. It produced for a little a hush between them, at the end of which her companion said with extraordinary gentleness and tenderness: “Dear old Nanda!” Her own silence appeared consciously to continue, and the suggestion of it might have been that for intelligent ears there was nothing to add to the declaration she had just made and which Mitchy sat there taking in as with a new light. What he drew from it indeed he presently went on to show. “You’re too awfully interesting. Of course--you know a lot. How shouldn’t you--and why?” “‘Why’? Oh that’s another affair! But you don’t imagine what I know; I’m sure it’s much more than you’ve a notion of. That’s the kind of thing now one IS--just except the little marvel of Aggie. What on earth,” the girl pursued, “do you take us for?” “Oh it’s all right!” breathed Mitchy, divinely pacific. “I’m sure I don’t know whether it is; I shouldn’t wonder if it were in fact all wrong. But what at least is certainly right is for one not to pretend anything else. There I am for you at any rate. Now the beauty of Aggie is that she knows nothing--but absolutely, utterly: not the least little tittle of anything.” It was barely visible that Mitchy hesitated, and he spoke quite gravely. “Have you tried her?” “Oh yes. And Tishy has.” His gravity had been less than Nanda’s. “Nothing, nothing.” The memory of some scene or some passage might have come back to her with a charm. “Ah say what you will--it IS the way we ought to be!” Mitchy, after a minute of much intensity, had stopped watching her; changing his posture and with his elbows on his knees he dropped for a while his face into his hands. Then he jerked himself to his feet. “There’s something I wish awfully I could say to you. But I can’t.” Nanda, after a slow headshake, covered him with one of the dimmest of her smiles. “You needn’t say it. I know perfectly which it is.” She held him an instant, after which she went on: “It’s simply that you wish me fully to understand that you’re one who, in perfect sincerity, doesn’t mind one straw how awful--!” “Yes, how awful?” He had kindled, as he paused, with his new eagerness. “Well, one’s knowledge may be. It doesn’t shock in you a single hereditary prejudice.” “Oh ‘hereditary’--!” Mitchy ecstatically murmured. “You even rather like me the better for it; so that one of the reasons why you couldn’t have told me--though not of course, I know, the only one--is that you would have been literally almost ashamed. Because, you know,” she went on, “it IS strange.” “My lack of hereditary--?”