"Well, _with_ such a home--!" But, quite beautifully, she had too much
tact to dot so monstrous an _i_, and it was precisely an illustration of
the way she didn't rattle. How could any one--of any wit--insist on any
one else's "wanting" to live in New York?

"Oh," he said, "I _might_ have lived here (since I had my opportunity
early in life); I might have put in here all these years. Then
everything would have been different enough--and, I dare say, 'funny'
enough. But that's another matter. And then the beauty of it--I mean of
my perversity, of my refusal to agree to a 'deal'--is just in the total
absence of a reason. Don't you see that if I had a reason about the
matter at all it would _have_ to be the other way, and would then be
inevitably a reason of dollars? There are no reasons here _but_ of
dollars. Let us therefore have none whatever--not the ghost of one."

They were back in the hall then for departure, but from where they stood
the vista was large, through an open door, into the great square main
saloon, with its almost antique felicity of brave spaces between windows.
Her eyes came back from that reach and met his own a moment. "Are you
very sure the 'ghost' of one doesn't, much rather, serve--?"

He had a positive sense of turning pale. But it was as near as they were
then to come. For he made answer, he believed, between a glare and a
grin: "Oh ghosts--of course the place must swarm with them! I should be
ashamed of it if it didn't. Poor Mrs. Muldoon's right, and it's why I
haven't asked her to do more than look in."

Miss Staverton's gaze again lost itself, and things she didn't utter, it
was clear, came and went in her mind. She might even for the minute, off