"
"And nowhere else?"
"We spent a few days in Rome. We usually prefer the quiet places; that
is my mother's taste."
"It was not your mother's taste, then," said Bernard, "that brought you
to Baden?"
She looked at him a moment.
"You mean that Baden is not quiet?"
Longueville glanced about at the moving, murmuring crowd, at the lighted
windows of the Conversation-house, at the great orchestra perched up in
its pagoda.
"This is not my idea of absolute tranquillity."
"Nor mine, either," said Miss Vivian. "I am not fond of absolute
tranquillity."
"How do you arrange it, then, with your mother?"
Again she looked at him a moment, with her clever, slightly mocking
smile.
"As you see. By making her come where I wish."
"You have a strong will," said Bernard. "I see that."
"No. I have simply a weak mother. But I make sacrifices too, sometimes."
"What do you call sacrifices?"
"Well, spending the winter at Sorrento."
Bernard began to laugh, and then he told her she must have had a very
happy life--"to call a winter at Sorrento a sacrifice."
"It depends upon what one gives up," said Miss Vivian.
"What did you give up?"
She touched him with her mocking smile again.
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