."

She considered this objection with her eyes on his face. "Well then we
do care. Only--!"

"Only it's a big subject."

"Oh yes--no doubt; it's a big subject." She appeared to wish to meet him
on everything reasonable. "Even Mr. Longdon admits that."

Vanderbank wondered. "You mean you talk over with him--!"

"The subject of girls? Why we scarcely discuss anything else."

"Oh no wonder then you're not bored. But you mean," he asked, "that he
recognises the inevitable change--?"

"He can't shut his eyes to the facts. He sees we're quite a different
thing."

"I dare say"--her friend was fully appreciative. "Yet the old
thing--what do YOU know of it?"

"I personally? Well, I've seen some change even in MY short life. And
aren't the old books full of us? Then Mr. Longdon himself has told me."

Vanderbank smoked and smoked. "You've gone into it with him?"

"As far as a man and a woman can together."

As he took her in at this with a turn of his eye he might have had in
his ears the echo of all the times it had been dropped in Buckingham
Crescent that Nanda was "wonderful." She WAS indeed. "Oh he's of course
on certain sides shy."

"Awfully--too beautifully. And then there's Aggie," the girl pursued. "I
mean for the real old thing."

"Yes, no doubt--if she BE the real old thing. But what the deuce really
IS Aggie?"

"Well," said Nanda with the frankest interest, "she's a miracle. If
one could be her exactly, absolutely, without the least little mite of
change, one would probably be wise to close with it. Otherwise--except
for anything BUT that--I'd rather brazen it out as myself."

There fell between them on this a silence of some minutes, after which
it would probably not have been possible for either to say if their eyes
had met while it lasted. This was at any rate not the case as Vanderbank
at last remarked: "Your brass, my dear young lady, is pure gold!"

"Then it's of me, I think, that Harold ought to borrow."

"You mean therefore that mine isn't?" Vanderbank went on.

"Well, you really haven't any natural 'cheek'--not like SOME of them.
You're in yourself as uneasy, if anything's said and every one giggles
or makes some face, as Mr. Longdon, and if Lord Petherton hadn't once
told me that a man hates almost as much to be called modest as a woman
does, I'd say that very often in London now you must pass some bad
moments."

The present might precisely have been one of them, we should doubtless