'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 be other things, and they would all have to be weighed.... It wouldn't be easy.' 'No,' Betty said; 'I suppose not. So it's just as well, really, that it can't come to that, that we can't take anything--not either of us, not ever, because of all the things between.' Then, all the things between growing with the words to insistence, Betty mentioned some of them, impelled, now the barriers were so breaking, to have everything clear. 'There are so many things.... There's all the money we owe. We must pay it back.' Prudence silently assented. She wondered how much the Crevequers owed Warren Venables. 'There are c-crowds of other things,' the sad voice stammered on--'everything, almost.... But you know it all. You have known it all the time.' Their eyes met and looked away. Prudence did not at all deny that she had known it all the time.