'Not England. We couldn't live there; it's never, never warm.... Perhaps Genoa; we know it so well. But Tommy may not find anything to do; he's never been on a regular, proper paper....' Swiftly, at Marchese Peppino, the colour surged over her face; the room was so full of it. She said quickly, a sudden throbbing of helpless anger choking her speech: 'That, too—that, too—everything—you've spoilt it—and w-what can you give us instead?'
'What would you take?' Prudence said, with a very grave and very gentle directness, turning the tables thus.
Betty's sad regard, emptied of anger, owned them turned. But she felt a sudden desire to know.
'If we could take anything ... would you give it? You?'
The emphasis on the pronoun put it in the singular number, thus setting Betty's own acceptance or refusal of offerings outside the range of question and answer, as she had meant. For she was very tired of talking about that. To the personal question Prudence, after a full minute of thinking it over, returned a deliberating answer:
'I don't quite know.'
It was indeed what she had been for some time wondering. But the spoken words seemed to strike her with a sense of incompleteness, of a gap somewhere between themselves and the thought they should have accurately fitted. Prudence, who did not very often clothe her thoughts, was fastidious, when she did, about the garments' fit. She tried something else—a dubious 'I can't be sure, but I suppose ... in the end ... I probably should.'
Betty watched the doubtful pondering. She said:
'You mean because you would think we had a claim? Yes, I know.'
And Prudence returned slowly: