The Sense of the Past

by Henry James

"Mercy, brother, what a stupid speech!" Molly impatiently exclaimed. "Does it depend so on sweet Nan that anyone should take an interest——?" She went on to her brother, but looking with this, in her rich way, at their kinsman and giving that gentleman thus any number of her frankest reminders. "How was he not to take in the news that letters asked for and that letters gave?—and how at all events, for my part, am I not to be quite content that he makes no stranger of me?"

"Yes, my dear," Ralph at once declared, "it certainly can't be said that I've made any stranger of you!" He took her reminders and gave her back for them proportionate vows—in spite of which what she seemed most to have passed on to him was the name she herself had taken from her brother. Thus it was that, incongruously enough, it broke from his lips too. "'Sweet Nan, sweet Nan!'—how could a fellow not be taken by a thing as charming as that? Sweet Nan, sweet Nan!"—he obeyed the oddest impulse to say it over and over. With which then, none the less, as if for avoidance of his turning silly, he addressed to his companion such a vague extenuating smile as he knew he would have taken, had it been addressed to himself, for a positive grin of aggravation.

"If you make so much of it as that," Miss Midmore amiably replied, "I shall have to think you love it better than what you might call me."

"Call you? Why, I'll call you anything you like. Miss!" he laughed—but still too much, as he felt, in the sense of his vagueness.

"Oh upon my word," she tossed up her head to say, "if you can't think yourself of what I should like I'm not the girl to hunt it up for you."

"What do you say to 'jolly Molly'?" her brother, on this, took leave to ask, putting the question to Ralph with an unexpected friendly candour. "If you had heard her named that way wouldn't it have made you want to know her? But perhaps it was the way, and that it was so you were taken captive. Of course I don't know, in spite of what they say," he went on, "what has shaken us so together."

"It must have been that he had heard of you as merry Perry!" the girl at once retorted; upon which Mrs. Midmore as promptly remarked that she had never in her life listened to so much nonsense.

"One would really think," she continued to Ralph, "that such things as letters had never passed between us, and that it's a mistake or a mystery that Molly herself, from a year ago, wrote to you under my approval."

"He wrote to me under my own," Molly said, while her bold eyes, all provoking indulgence, suggested to him again in that connection more matters than any he immediately grasped. But he felt he must try to grasp, having somehow got so ridiculously off and away. Of course he would have written to her, of course he must and with the lapse of another moment he had expressed this for his relief—making the point to extravagance in fact, in order to make it at all.

"I wrote you three to your one, you know—which I dare say you will have noticed," he observed to her mother, "since I hope she was always pleased enough."