“Yes, discomfort in presence of the fact I speak of. There’s a kind of sense you don’t possess.” His appreciation again fairly goggled at her. “Oh you do know everything!” “You’re so good that nothing shocks you,” she lucidly persisted. “There’s a kind of delicacy you haven’t got.” He was more and more struck. “I’ve only that--as it were--of the skin and the fingers?” he appealed. “Oh and that of the mind. And that of the soul. And some other kinds certainly. But not THE kind.” “Yes”--he wondered--“I suppose that’s the only way one can name it.” It appeared to rise there before him. “THE kind!” “The kind that would make me painful to you. Or rather not me perhaps,” she added as if to create between them the fullest possible light; “but my situation, my exposure--all the results of them I show. Doesn’t one become a sort of a little drain-pipe with everything flowing through?” “Why don’t you call it more gracefully,” Mitchy asked, freshly struck, “a little aeolian-harp set in the drawing-room window and vibrating in the breeze of conversation?” “Oh because the harp gives out a sound, and WE--at least we try to--give out none.” “What you take, you mean, you keep?” “Well, it sticks to us. And that’s what you don’t mind!” Their eyes met long on it. “Yes--I see. I DON’T mind. I’ve the most extraordinary lacunae.” “Oh I don’t know about others,” Nanda replied; “I haven’t noticed them. But you’ve that one, and it’s enough.” He continued to face her with his queer mixture of assent and speculation. “Enough for what, my dear? To have made me impossible for you because the only man you could, as they say, have ‘respected’ would be a man who WOULD have minded?” Then as under the cool soft pressure of the question she looked at last away from him: “The man with ‘THE kind,’ as you call it, happens to be just the type you CAN love? But what’s the use,” he persisted as she answered nothing, “in loving a person with the prejudice--hereditary or other--to which you’re precisely obnoxious? Do you positively LIKE to love in vain?” It was a question, the way she turned back to him seemed to say, that deserved a responsible answer. “Yes.” But she had moved off after speaking, and Mitchy’s eyes followed her to different parts of the room as, with small pretexts of present attention to it, small bestowed touches for symmetry, she slowly measured it. “What’s extraordinary then is your idea of my finding any charm in Aggie’s ignorance.” She immediately put down an old snuff-box. “Why--it’s the one sort of thing you don’t know. You can’t imagine,” she said as she returned to him, “the effect it will produce on you. You must get really near it and see it all come out to feel all its beauty. You’ll like it, Mitchy”--and Nanda’s gravity was wonderful--“better than anything you HAVE known.”