THE SACRED FOUNT
I sought to combine firmness with my mildness. "What do you do with it?"
But she could match me at this. "I thought you wouldn't hear of it!"
"It's not a question of my dispositions. It's a question of her having been, or not been, for you 'all over the place,' and of everyone's also being, for you, on the chatter about it. You go by that in respect to Long—by your holding, that is, that nothing has been noticed; therefore mustn't you go by it in respect to her—since I understand from you that everything has?"
"Everything always is," Mrs. Briss agreeably replied, "in a place and a party like this; but so little—anything in particular—that, with people moving 'every which' way, it comes to the same as if nothing was. Things are not, also, gouged out to your tune, and it depends, still further, on what you mean by 'extravagant.'"
"I mean whatever you yourself meant."
"Well, I myself mean no longer, you know, what I did mean."
"She isn't then———?"
But suddenly she was almost sharp with me. "Isn't what?"
"What the woman we so earnestly looked for would have to be."
"All gone?" She had hesitated, but she went on with decision. "No, she isn't all gone, since
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