The question came as hard as a stroke after the cushioned assurance preceding it. Jeff met it as he might have met such a query from a man to whom he owed no veilings of hard facts.
"I don't know," said he. "If I did know I shouldn't tell you."
Madame Beattie seemed not to suspect the possibility of rebuff.
"Esther hasn't changed a particle," said she.
Jeff scowled, not at her, but absently at the side of the house, and made no answer.
"Aren't you coming down there?" asked Madame Beattie peremptorily, with the air of drumming him up to some task that would have to be reckoned with in the end. "Come, Jeff, why don't you answer? Aren't you coming down?"
Jeffrey had ceased scowling. He had smoothed his brows out with his hand, indeed, as if their tenseness hurt him.
"Look here," said he, "you ask a lot of questions."
She laughed again, a different sort of old laugh, a fat and throaty one.
"Did I ever tell you," said she, "what the Russian grand duke said when I asked him why he didn't marry?"