Thursdale colored again. "Free?" he stammered, with a sense of physical
disgust at contact with such crassness.
"Yes--if I had quite done with you." She smiled in recovered security.
"It seems she likes clear outlines; she has a passion for definitions."
"Yes--well?" he said, wincing at the echo of his own subtlety.
"Well--and when I told her that you had never belonged to me, she
wanted me to define _my_ status--to know exactly where I had stood all
along."
Thursdale sat gazing at her intently; his hand was not yet on the clue.
"And even when you had told her that--"
"Even when I had told her that I had _had_ no status--that I had never
stood anywhere, in any sense she meant," said Mrs. Vervain,
slowly--"even then she wasn't satisfied, it seems."