She paused, but clearly for assent. “That’s what I mean by your taking me as I am. It IS, you know, for a girl—extraordinary.”
“Oh I know what it is!” he exclaimed with an odd fatigue in his tenderness.
But she continued, with the shadow of her scruple, to explain. “We’re many of us, we’re most of us—as you long ago saw and showed you felt—extraordinary now. We can’t help it. It isn’t really our fault. There’s so much else that’s extraordinary that if we’re in it all so much we must naturally be.” It was all obviously clearer to her than ever yet, and her sense of it found renewed expression; so that she might have been, as she wound up, a very much older person than her friend. “Everything’s different from what it used to be.”
“Yes, everything,” he returned with an air of final indoctrination. “That’s what he ought to have recognised.”
“As YOU have?” Nanda was once more—and completely now—enthroned in high justice. “Oh he’s more old-fashioned than you.”
“Much more,” said Mr. Longdon with a queer face.
“He tried,” the girl went on—“he did his best. But he couldn’t. And he’s so right—for himself.”
Her visitor, before meeting this, gathered in his hat and stick, which for a minute occupied his attention. “He ought to have married—!”
“Little Aggie? Yes,” said Nanda.
They had gained the door, where Mr. Longdon again met her eyes. “And then Mitchy—!”