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—?”
“Yes, discomfort in presence of the fact I speak of. There’s a kind of sense you don’t possess.”