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!”