What were the words so repeatedly on his lips, yet so repeatedly not sounded?
It would have struck our observer that they were probably not those his lips even now actually formed.

"Doesn't he perhaps talk to you too much about yourself ?" Nanda gave him a dim smile, and he might indeed then have exclaimed on a certain resemblance, a resemblance of expression that had nothing to do with form.

It wouldn't have been diminished for him moreover by her successful suppression of every sign that she felt his question a little of a snub.

The recall he had previously mentioned could, however, as she answered him, only have been brushed away by a supervening sense of his roughness.

"It probably isn't so much that as my own way of going on." She spoke with a mildness that could scarce have been so full without being an effort.