, which
Mr. Longdon, all courtesy for her, glanced at. "Stories from English
History. Oh!"

His ejaculation, though vague, was not such as to prevent the girl from
venturing gently: "Have you read it?"

Mr. Longdon, receiving her pure little smile, showed he felt he had
never so taken her in as at this moment, as well as also that she was a
person with whom he should surely get on. "I think I must have."

Little Aggie was still more encouraged, but not to the point of keeping
anything back. "It hasn't any author. It's anonymous."

The Duchess borrowed, for another question to Mr. Longdon, not a little
of her gravity. "Is it all right?"

"I don't know"--his answer was to Aggie. "There have been some horrid
things in English history."

"Oh horrid--HAVEN'T there?" Aggie, whose speech had the prettiest
faintest foreignness, sweetly and eagerly quavered.

"Well, darling, Mr. Longdon will recommend to you some nice historical
work--for we love history, don't we?--that leaves the horrors out. We
like to know," the Duchess explained to the authority she invoked, "the
cheerful happy RIGHT things. There are so many, after all, and this is
the place to remember them. A tantot."

As she passed into the house by the nearest of the long windows that
stood open Mr. Longdon placed himself beside her little charge, whom he
treated, for the next ten minutes, with an exquisite courtesy. A person
who knew him well would, if present at the scene, have found occasion
in it to be freshly aware that he was in his quiet way master of two
distinct kinds of urbanity, the kind that added to distance and the kind
that diminished it. Such an analyst would furthermore have noted, in
respect to the aunt and the niece, of which kind each had the benefit,
and might even have gone so far as to detect in him some absolute
betrayal of the impression produced on him by his actual companion, some
irradiation of his certitude that, from the point of view under which
she had been formed, she was a remarkable, a rare success. Since to
create a particular little rounded and tinted innocence had been aimed
at, the fruit had been grown to the perfection of a peach on a sheltered
wall, and this quality of the object resulting from a process might well
make him feel himself in contact with something wholly new. Little Aggie
differed from any young person he had ever met in that she had been
deliberately prepared for consumption and in that furthermore the