hension.

Betty said again, half to herself, how they were spoilt, the old things.
'And what new things can there be, ever, for us?' On Prudence, who had
done her share of the spoiling, she still made her stammering claim,
blind-eyed, without hope.

Prudence's response to it was a doubting question.

'If they're spoilt then ... you'll leave them?'

Betty's eyes hung on hers.

'You mean not come back here? Oh, we don't want to; I've told you that's
spoilt. But where else?... Tommy couldn't get anything to do at Santa
Caterina.'

Prudence said there were other places in Italy for a journalist. Or
perhaps even England.... But at that Betty shook her head. No spoilt
things should drive her to that place of damp half-lights.

'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:

'A little that. But that shouldn't count much.... There would