ice."

"Oh 'hereditary'--!" Mitchy ecstatically murmured.

"You even rather like me the better for it; so that one of the reasons
why you couldn't have told me--though not of course, I know, the only
one--is that you would have been literally almost ashamed. Because, you
know," she went on, "it IS strange."

"My lack of hereditary--?"

"Yes, discomfort in presence of the fact I speak of. There's a kind of
sense you don't possess."

His appreciation again fairly goggled at her. "Oh you do know
everything!"

"You're so good that nothing shocks you," she lucidly persisted.
"There's a kind of delicacy you haven't got."

He was more and more struck. "I've only that--as it were--of the skin
and the fingers?" he appealed.

"Oh and that of the mind. And that of the soul. And some other kinds
certainly. But not THE kind."

"Yes"--he wondered--"I suppose that's the only way one can name it." It
appeared to rise there before him. "THE kind!"

"The kind that would make me painful to you. Or rather not me perhaps,"
she added as if to create between them the fullest possible light; "but
my situation, my exposure--all the results of them I show. Doesn't one
become a sort of a little drain-pipe with everything flowing through?"

"Why don't you call it more gracefully," Mitchy asked, freshly struck,
"a little aeolian-harp set in the drawing-room window and vibrating in
the breeze of conversation?"

"Oh because the harp gives out a sound, and WE--at least we try to--give
out none."

"What you take, you mean, you keep?"

"Well, it sticks to us. And that's what you don't mind!"

Their eyes met long on it. "Yes--I see. I DON'T mind. I've the most
extraordinary lacunae."

"Oh I don't know about others," Nanda replied; "I haven't noticed them.
But you've that one, and it's enough."

He continued to face her with his queer mixture of assent and
speculation. "Enough for what, my dear? To have made me impossible for
you because the only man you could, as they say, have 'respected' would
be a man who WOULD have minded?" Then as under the cool soft pressure of
the question she looked at last away from him: "The man with 'THE kind,'
as you call it, happens to be just the type you CAN love? But what's the
use," he persisted as she answered nothing, "in loving a person with the
prejudice--hereditary or other--to which you're precisely obnoxious? Do
you positively LIKE to love in vain?"

It was a question, the way she turned ba