I don't see," Mrs.Brook added, "what still keeps her on the edge, which isn't an inch wide." Vanderbank looked this time as if he only tried to wonder.

"Isn't it YOU ?" Mrs.Brook mused more deeply.

"Sometimes I think so.

But I don't know." "Yes, how CAN you of course know, since she can't tell you ?" "Oh if I depended on her telling--!" Mrs.Brook shook out with this a sofa-cushion or two and sank into the corner she had arranged.

The August afternoon was hot and the London air heavy; the room moreover, though agreeably bedimmed, gave out the staleness of the season's end.
"If you hadn't come to-day," she went on, "you'd have missed me till I don't know when, for we've let the Hovel again--wretchedly, but still we've let it--and I go down on Friday to see that it isn't too filthy.
Edward, who's furious at what I've taken for it, had his idea that we should go there this year ourselves." "And now"-- Vanderbank took her up--"that fond fancy has become simply the ghost of a dead thought, a ghost that, in company with a thousand predecessors, haunts the house in the twilight and pops at you out of odd corners." "Oh Edward's dead thoughts are indeed a cheerful company and worthy of the perpetual mental mourning we seem to go about in.