Again she had the sensation, familiar to her since yesterday, of the world reeling to pieces around her while her own personality survived. When she spoke, her voice sounded as if it came out of the wildness of a surging wreck.
"Then that's what you meant in saying yesterday that when everything was settled you still wouldn't be able to pay all you owed."
"That's what I meant—exactly."
He lay perfectly still, except that he raised his hand and puffed at his extinct cigar. She looked down at the pattern on the Persian rug beside his couch—a symmetrical scroll of old rose, on a black ground sown with multicolored flowerets.
"I suppose it's the Clay heirs and the Rodman heirs you owe the money to?"
"And the Compton heirs, and old Miss Burnaby, and the two Misses Brown, and—"
"Haven't they anything left?"
"Oh yes. It isn't all gone, by any means." Then he added, as if to make a clean breast of the affair and be done with it: "The personal property—what you may call the cash—is mostly gone! Those that have owned real estate—like the Rodmans and Fanny Burnaby—well, they've got that still."
"I see." She continued to sit looking meditatively down at the rug. "I suppose," she ventured, after long thinking, "that that's the money we've been living on all these years?"
"Yes; in the main." He felt it useless to quibble or to try to extenuate the facts.