In "The Open Window," what does Vera ask Framton Nuttel to break the silence?

In
"" Mrs. Sappleton sends her fifteeen-year-old niece down to talk to their visitor
Framton Nuttel for a few minutes before she puts in her own appearance. No doubt, the aunt is
training the girl to be a gracious hostess like herself and giving her a little solo experience
with this stranger. Vera seems not only mischievous but rebellious and resentful at being molded
into the tedious domestic role being prepared for her as a housewife and mother confined to a
country estate where there is never anything to do but shoot birds and talk about shooting
birds. She is almost like a adolescent Hedda Gabler. She looks sweet and innocent, but inside
she is burning up. She despises her aunt, who apparently doesn't even read books, and who she
knows will talk about nothing but killing birds while she waits for the all-important males in
her life to return through the open window.

"Do you
know many of the people round here?" asked the niece, when she judged that they had had
sufficient silent communion.

Vera isn't only trying to
break the silence but also to find out if Framton knows anything about her family.

"Hardly a soul," said Framton. "My sister was staying
here, at the rectory, you know, some four years ago, and she gave me letters of introduction to
some of the people here."

"Then you know practically nothing about
my aunt?" pursued the self-possessed young lady.

"Only her name and
address," admitted the caller.

This is all the
assurance Vera needs in order to go ahead and make up her fantastic story about how the three
men went hunting and were engulfed in a bog exactly three years ago.twice describes her as
"self-possessed." She certainly does seem self-possessed -- but this characteristic
will make her story seem all the more credible when she pretends to lose that
self-possession.

Framton shivered slightly and turned
towards the niece with a look intended to convey sympathetic comprehension. The child was
staring out through the open window with dazed horror in her eyes. In a chill shock of nameless
fear Framton swung round in his seat and looked in the same direction.

The reader can imagine the kind of face this precocious girl is
making: with wide eyes and open mouth and all the blood draining from her face. She is an
actress as well as a story-teller.

Poor Framton came to the country hoping to
cure his nerves.

"The doctors agree in ordering me
complete rest, an absence of mental excitement, and avoidance of anything in the nature of
violent physical exercise," announced Framton, who laboured under the tolerably wide-spread
delusion that total strangers and chance acquaintances are hungry for the least detail of one's
ailments and infirmities, their causes and cure. "On the matter of diet they are not so
much in agreement," he continued.

Framton will not
only get plenty of mental excitement, but he will  get plenty of violent physical exercise when
he goes running out of the house and all the way down a country road. His mention of "the
matter of diet" sounds like a hint that he might like to be invited to stay for supper. He
seems to be suggesting that he is not particularly fastidious about what he can and cannot eat.
Vera must have found him a terrible bore and may have wanted to forestall having him as a guest
at dinner. In any case, she was wise to scare him out of the house before he had an opportunity
to find out that the three men were not really ghosts and her aunt was not really so
crazy.