to me to hold the strings of such a lot of
queer little dramas. Have something on the shelf for me when we meet
again. THE thing just now is the outlook for Mitchy's affair. One cares
enough for old Mitch to fancy one may feel safer for a lead or two. In
fact I want regularly to turn you on."

"Ah but the thing I happen to have taken it into my head to say to you,"
Nanda now securely enough replied, "hasn't the least bit to do, I assure
you, either with Aggie or with 'old Mitch.' If you don't want to hear
it--want some way of getting off--please believe THEY won't help you a
bit." It was quite in fact that she felt herself at last to have found
the right tone. Nothing less than a conviction of this could have made
her after an instant add: "What in the world, Mr. Van, are you afraid
of?"

Well, that it WAS the right tone a single little minute was sufficient
to prove--a minute, I must yet haste to say, big enough in spite of its
smallness to contain the longest look on any occasion exchanged between
these friends. It was one of those looks--not so frequent, it must be
admitted, as the muse of history, dealing at best in short cuts, is
often by the conditions of her trade reduced to representing them--which
after they have come and gone are felt not only to have changed
relations but absolutely to have cleared the air. It certainly helped
Vanderbank to find his answer. "I'm only afraid, I think, of your
conscience."

He had been indeed for the space more helped than she. "My conscience?"

"Think it over--quite at your leisure--and some day you'll understand.
There's no hurry," he continued--"no hurry. And when you do understand,
it needn't make your existence a burden to you to fancy you must tell
me." Oh he was so kind--kinder than ever now. "The thing is, you see,
that _I_ haven't a conscience. I only want my fun."

They had on this a second look, also decidedly comfortable, though
discounted, as the phrase is, by the other, which had really in its
way exhausted the possibilities of looks. "Oh I want MY fun too," said
Nanda, "and little as it may strike you in some ways as looking like it,
just this, I beg you to believe, is the real thing. What's at the bottom
of it," she went on, "is a talk I had not long ago with mother."

"Oh yes," Van returned with brightly blushing interest. "The fun," he
laughed, "that's to be got out of 'mother'!"

"Oh I'm not thinking so much of that. I'm thinking of any that she
hers