“They’re one of the couples who are invited together.” But his face reflected so little success for her levity that it was in another tone she presently added: “Mitchy really oughtn’t.” Her friend, in silence, fixed his eyes on the ground; an attitude in which there was something to make her strike rather wild. “But of course, kind as he is, he can scarcely be called particular. He has his ideas—he thinks nothing matters. He says we’ve all come to a pass that’s the end of everything.”
Mr. Longdon remained mute a while, and when he at last, raised his eyes it was without meeting Nanda’s and with some dryness of manner. “The end of everything? One might easily receive that impression.”
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?”
“Well, every one isn’t so beautiful as you.” She had met him with promptitude, yet no sooner had she spoken than she appeared again to encounter a difficulty. “But there it is—my just saying even that. Oh how I always know—as I’ve told you before—whenever I’m different! I can’t ask you to tell me the things Granny WOULD have said, because that’s simply arranging to keep myself back from you, and so being nasty and underhand, which you naturally don’t want, nor I either. Nevertheless when I say the things she wouldn’t, then I put before you too much—too much for your liking it—what I know and see and feel. If we’re both partly the result of other people, HER other people were so different.” The girl’s sensitive boldness kept it up, but there was something in her that pleaded for patience. “And yet if she had YOU, so I’ve got you too. It’s the flattery of that, or the sound of it, I know, that must be so unlike her. Of course it’s awfully like mother; yet it isn’t as if you hadn’t already let me see—is it?—that you don’t really think me the same.” Again she stopped a minute, as to find her scarce possible way with him, and again for the time he gave no sign. She struck out once more with her strange cool limpidity. “Granny wasn’t the kind of girl she COULDN’t be—and so neither am I.”
Mr. Longdon had fallen while she talked into something that might have been taken for a conscious temporary submission to her; he had uncrossed his fidgety legs and, thrusting them out with the feet together, sat looking very hard before him, his chin sunk on his breast and his hands, clasped as they met, rapidly twirling their thumbs. So he remained for a time that might have given his young friend the sense of having made herself right for him so far as she had been wrong. He still had all her attention, just as previously she had had his, but, while he now simply gazed and thought, she watched him with a discreet solicitude that would almost have represented him as a near relative whom she supposed unwell. At the end he looked round, and then, obeying some impulse that had gathered in her while they sat mute, she put out to him the tender hand she might have offered to a sick child. They had been talking about frankness, but she showed a frankness in this instance that made him perceptibly colour. To that in turn, however, he responded only the more completely, taking her hand and holding it, keeping it a long minute during which their eyes met and something seemed to clear up that had been too obscure to be dispelled by words. Finally he brought out as if, though it was what he had been thinking of, her gesture had most determined him: “I wish immensely you’d get married!”