第32章

"Oh yes, she said you were engaged to her.That was why--since IHAD broken out--she thought I might like to see you; as I assure you I've been so delighted to.But AREN'T you?" the good lady asked as if she saw in his face some ground for doubt.

"Assuredly--if she says so.It may seem very odd to you, but Ihaven't known, and yet I've felt that, being nothing whatever to you directly, I need some warrant for consenting thus to be thrust on you.We WERE," the young man explained, "engaged a year ago;but since then (if you don't mind my telling you such things; Ifeel now as if I could tell you anything!) I haven't quite known how I stand.It hasn't seemed we were in a position to marry.

Things are better now, but I haven't quite known how she'd see them.They were so bad six months ago that I understood her, Ithought, as breaking off.I haven't broken; I've only accepted, for the time--because men must be easy with women--being treated as 'the best of friends.' Well, I try to be.I wouldn't have come here if I hadn't been.I thought it would be charming for her to know you--when I heard from her the extraordinary way you had dawned upon her; and charming therefore if I could help her to it.

And if I'm helping you to know HER," he went on, "isn't that charming too?""Oh I so want to!" Miss Wenham murmured in her unpractical impersonal way."You're so different!" she wistfully declared.

"It's YOU, if I may respectfully, ecstatically say so, who are different.That's the point of it all.I'm not sure that anything so terrible really ought to happen to you as to know us.""Well," said Miss Wenham, "I do know you a little by this time, don't I? And I don't find it terrible.It's a delightful change for me.""Oh I'm not sure you ought to have a delightful change!""Why not--if you do?"

"Ah I can bear it.I'm not sure you can.I'm too bad to spoil--IAM spoiled.I'm nobody, in short; I'm nothing.I've no type.

You're ALL type.It has taken delicious long years of security and monotony to produce you.You fit your frame with a perfection only equalled by the perfection with which your frame fits you.So this admirable old house, all time-softened white within and time-faded red without, so everything that surrounds you here and that has, by some extraordinary mercy, escaped the inevitable fate of exploitation: so it all, I say, is the sort of thing that, were it the least bit to fall to pieces, could never, ah never more be put together again.I have, dear Miss Wenham," Granger went on, happy himself in his extravagance, which was yet all sincere, and happier still in her deep but altogether pleased mystification--"I've found, do you know, just the thing one has ever heard of that you most resemble.You're the Sleeping Beauty in the Wood."He still had no compunction when he heard her bewilderedly sigh:

"Oh you're too delightfully droll!"