I've seemed to see everything go." "Oh how can you say that," her visitor demanded, "when just what we've most been agreed upon so often is the practical impossibility of making any change?
Hasn't it seemed as if we really can't overcome conversational habits so thoroughly formed ?" Again Mrs.Brook reflected.

"As if our way of looking at things were too serious to be trifled with?
I don't know--I think it's only you who have denied our sacrifices, our compromises and concessions.

I myself have constantly felt smothered in them.

But there it is," she impatiently went on.

"What I don't admit is that you've given me ground to take for a proof of your 'intentions'-- to use the odious term--your association with me on behalf of the preposterous fiction, as it after all is, of Nanda's blankness of mind." Vanderbank's head, in his chair, was thrown back; his eyes ranged over the top of the room.