He explained the matter of the mortgage, carefully, but with an amount of technical detail meant to impose and mystify.
"Then how," she asked, "was the library redeemed?"
He repudiated an expression so charged with moral and emotional significance. He desired to lead her gently away from a line of thought that if pursued would give her intelligence the clue. "You can't call it redeemed. Nobody redeemed it. The debt, of course, had to be paid out of my father's estate."
"In which case the library became yours?"
He smiled involuntarily, for she had him there, and she knew it.
"It became nothing of the sort, and if it had I could hardly go against my father's wishes by holding on to it."
"Can't you see that it's equally impossible for me to take it?"
"Why? Try and think of it as a simple matter of business."
He spoke like a tired man, straining after a polite endurance of her feminine persistence and refining fantasy. "It hasn't anything to do with you or me."
Thus did he turn against her the argument with which she had crushed him in another such dispute nine years ago.