Page:The Sacred Fount (New York, Charles Scribner's Sons, 1901).djvu/178

 hasn't gone—you can see for yourself—to impress upon her anything; they have the most extraordinary way, which I've already observed, of sitting together without sound. I don't know," she laughed, "what's the matter with such people!"

"It proves in general," I admitted, "either some coldness or some warmth, and I quite understand that that's not the way you sit with your friends. You steer admirably clear of every extravagance. I don't see, at any rate, why Mrs. Server is a terror"

But she had already taken me up. "If she doesn't chatter as I do?" She thought it over. "But she does—to everyone but Mr. Briss. I mean to every man she can pick up."

I emulated her reflection. "Do they complain of it to you?"

"They're more civil than you," she returned; "for if, when they flee before it, they bump up against me in their flight, they don't explain that by intimating that they're come from bad to worse. Besides, I see what they suffer."

"And do you hear it?"

"What they suffer? No, I've taken care not to suffer myself. I don't listen. It's none of my business."

"Is that a way of gently expressing," I ventured to ask, "that it's also none of mine?"

"It might be," she replied, "if I had, as you 172