-whenever I'm different!
I can't ask you to tell me the things Granny WOULD have said, because
that's simply arranging to keep myself back from you, and so being
nasty and underhand, which you naturally don't want, nor I either.
Nevertheless when I say the things she wouldn't, then I put before you
too much--too much for your liking it--what I know and see and feel. If
we're both partly the result of other people, HER other people were
so different." The girl's sensitive boldness kept it up, but there was
something in her that pleaded for patience. "And yet if she had YOU, so
I've got you too. It's the flattery of that, or the sound of it, I know,
that must be so unlike her. Of course it's awfully like mother; yet it
isn't as if you hadn't already let me see--is it?--that you don't really
think me the same." Again she stopped a minute, as to find her scarce
possible way with him, and again for the time he gave no sign. She
struck out once more with her strange cool limpidity. "Granny wasn't the
kind of girl she COULDN't be--and so neither am I."

Mr. Longdon had fallen while she talked into something that might have
been taken for a conscious temporary submission to her; he had uncrossed
his fidgety legs and, thrusting them out with the feet together, sat
looking very hard before him, his chin sunk on his breast and his hands,
clasped as they met, rapidly twirling their thumbs. So he remained for
a time that might have given his young friend the sense of having made
herself right for him so far as she had been wrong. He still had all her
attention, just as previously she had had his, but, while he now simply
gazed and thought, she watched him with a discreet solicitude that would
almost have represented him as a near relative whom she supposed unwell.
At the end he looked round, and then, obeying some impulse that had
gathered in her while they sat mute, she put out to him the tender hand
she might have offered to a sick child. They had been talking about
frankness, but she showed a frankness in this instance that made him
perceptibly colour. To that in turn, however, he responded only the more
completely, taking her hand and holding it, keeping it a long minute
during which their eyes met and something seemed to clear up that had
been too obscure to be dispelled by words. Finally he brought out as
if, though it was what he had been thinking of, her gesture had most
determined him: "I wish immensely you'd get married!"