“As you say, yes”—he sympathetically inclined his head. “But without making me feel exactly what you mean by it.”
“Keep her,” Nanda returned, “from becoming like the Duchess.”
“But she isn’t a bit like the Duchess in any of her elements. She’s a totally different thing.”
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.”