“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.”
“The only thing that remains to me in life,” he answered, “is a certain accessibility to the thought of what I may still do to figure a little in your eye; but that’s precisely a thought you may assist to become clearer. You may for instance give me some pledge or sign that if I do figure—prance and caracole and sufficiently kick up the dust—your eye won’t suffer itself to be distracted from me. I think there’s no adventure I’m not ready to undertake for you; yet my passion—chastened, through all this, purified, austere—is still enough of this world not wholly to have renounced the fancy of some small reward.”
“How small?” the girl asked.
She spoke as if feeling she must take from him in common kindness at least as much as she would make him take, and the serious anxious patience such a consciousness gave her tone was met by Mitchy with a charmed reasonableness that his habit of hyperbole did nothing to misrepresent. He glowed at her with the fullest recognition that there was something he was there to discuss with her, but with the assurance in every soft sound of him that no height to which she might lift the discussion would be too great for him to reach. His every cadence and every motion was an implication, as from one to the other, of the exquisite. Oh he could sustain it! “Well, I mean the establishment of something between us. I mean your arranging somehow that we shall be drawn more together—know together something nobody else knows. I should like so terrifically to have a RELATION that is a secret, with you.”
“Oh if that’s all you want you can be easily gratified. Rien de plus facile, as mamma says. I’m full of secrets—I think I’m really most secretive. I’ll share almost any one of them with you—if it’s only a good one.”
Mitchy debated. “You mean you’ll choose it yourself? You won’t let it be one of mine?”