Chivers, with the pot still in his hands, fairly rocked in the high wind of so much confidence and such great transactions. He had nothing for these, however, but approval. "You did right to take this out, mum, when the fly went to the stables. Them flymen do be cruel rash with anything that's delicate." Of the delicacy of the vessel it now rested with him to deposit safely again he was by this time so appreciatively aware that in returning with it to its safe niche he stumbled into some obscure trap literally laid for him by his nervousness. It was the matter of a few seconds, of a false movement, a knock of the elbow, a gasp, a shriek, a complete little crash. There was the pot on the pavement, in several pieces, and the clumsy cup-bearer blue with fear. "Mercy _on_ us, mum,--I've brought shame on my old grey hairs!"
The little shriek of his companion had smothered itself in the utterance, and the next minute, with the ruin between them, they were contrastedly face to face. The charming woman, who had already found more voices in the air than anyone had found before, could, in the happy play of this power, find a poetry in her accident. "Oh, but the way you _take_ it!" she laughed--"you're too quaint to 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?"