Page:Two Magics.djvu/277

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COVERING END
269

live!" She looked at him as if he alone had suffered—as if his suffering indeed positively added to his charm. "The way you said that now—it's just the very 'type'! That's all I want of you now—to be the very type. It's what you are, you poor dear thing—for you can't help it; and it's what everything and everyone else is, over here; so that you had just better all make up your minds to it and not try to shirk it. There was a type in the train with me—the 'awfully nice girl' of all the English novels, the 'simple maiden in her flower' of—who is it?—your great poet. She couldn't help it either—in fact I wouldn't have let her!" With this, while Chivers picked up his fragments, his lady had a happy recall. His face, as he stood there with the shapeless elements of his humiliation fairly rattling again in his hands, was a reflection of her extraordinary manner of enlarging the subject, or rather, more beneficently perhaps, the space that contained it. "By the way, the girl was coming right here. Has she come?"

Chivers crept solemnly away, as if to bury his dead, which he consigned, with dumb rites, to a situation of honourable publicity; then, as he came back, he replied without elation: "Miss