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 there was enough of her left to make up to poor Briss."
"Precisely—and it's just what we saw, and just what, with her other dashes of the same sort, led us to have to face the question of her being—well, what I say. Or rather," I added, "what you say. That is," I amended, to keep perfectly straight, "what you say you don't say."