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"What do you think of Betty?" Nan was saying in a low voice.

"She's your latest discovery isn't she?... A trifle ... er ... unconscious I should say. No harm in her.... I wish she hadn't such a burr in her voice."

"O you are chilly."

"I didn't mean to be so pompous. She seems to like music. So rare in a musician."

Nan laughed.

"You seem to be feeling very superior this evening, Fanshaw. What have you done to be so cocky?"

"Little enough, God knows.... Nan, I wish we could get Wenny settled somehow. I'm worried about him. He ought to get to work at something definite."

"But he's so enormously alive, Fanshaw. How can one worry about him. O, if I had half his vitality, sensitiveness...."

"So much of that is sheer nerves ... in a man. In you it's different. There's something rock bottom about women that men haven't at all. We are lichen. If we are too alive we burn up and shrivel.... I wonder if he isn't a little too alive."

"Nonsense."

"Do you know you do us a lot of good, Nan?"

"If you think, young man, that I'm going to be anybody's rock of ages, you are mistaken, I can tell you that."