He met Madame de Chantelle's appeal by replying: "If there were anything I could possibly say I should want it to be in Miss Viner's favour.""You'd want it to be--yes! But could you make it so?""As far as facts go, I don't see how I can make it either for or against her.I've already said that I know nothing of her except that she's charming.""As if that weren't enough--weren't all there OUGHT to be!" Miss Painter put in impatiently.She seemed to address herself to Darrow, though her small eyes were fixed on her friend.
"Madame de Chantelle seems to imagine," she pursued, "that a young American girl ought to have a dossier--a police-record, or whatever you call it: what those awful women in the streets have here.In our country it's enough to know that a young girl's pure and lovely: people don't immediately ask her to show her bank-account and her visiting-list."Madame de Chantelle looked plaintively at her sturdy monitress."You don't expect me not to ask if she's got a family?""No; nor to think the worse of her if she hasn't.The fact that she's an orphan ought, with your ideas, to be a merit.
You won't have to invite her father and mother to Givre!""Adelaide--Adelaide!" the mistress of Givre lamented.
"Lucretia Mary," the other returned--and Darrow spared an instant's amusement to the quaint incongruity of the name--"you know you sent for Mr.Darrow to refute me; and how can he, till he knows what I think?""You think it's perfectly simple to let Owen marry a girl we know nothing about?""No; but I don't think it's perfectly simple to prevent him."The shrewdness of the answer increased Darrow's interest in Miss Painter.She had not hitherto struck him as being a person of much penetration, but he now felt sure that her gimlet gaze might bore to the heart of any practical problem.
Madame de Chantelle sighed out her recognition of the difficulty.
"I haven't a word to say against Miss Viner; but she's knocked about so, as it's called, that she must have been mixed up with some rather dreadful people.If only Owen could be made to see that--if one could get at a few facts, I mean.She says, for instance, that she has a sister; but it seems she doesn't even know her address!""If she does, she may not want to give it to you.I daresay the sister's one of the dreadful people.I've no doubt that with a little time you could rake up dozens of them: have her 'traced', as they call it in detective stories.I don't think you'd frighten Owen, but you might: it's natural enough he should have been corrupted by those foreign ideas.
You might even manage to part him from the girl; but you couldn't keep him from being in love with her.I saw that when I looked them over last evening.I said to myself:
'It's a real old-fashioned American case, as sweet and sound as home-made bread.' Well, if you take his loaf away from him, what are you going to feed him with instead? Which of your nasty Paris poisons do you think he'll turn to?
Supposing you succeed in keeping him out of a really bad mess--and, knowing the young man as I do, I rather think that, at this crisis, the only way to do it would be to marry him slap off to somebody else--well, then, who, may Iask, would you pick out? One of your sweet French ingenues, I suppose? With as much mind as a minnow and as much snap as a soft-boiled egg.You might hustle him into that kind of marriage; I daresay you could--but if I know Owen, the natural thing would happen before the first baby was weaned.""I don't know why you insinuate such odious things against Owen!""Do you think it would be odious of him to return to his real love when he'd been forcibly parted from her? At any rate, it's what your French friends do, every one of them!
Only they don't generally have the grace to go back to an old love; and I believe, upon my word, Owen would!"Madame de Chantelle looked at her with a mixture of awe and exultation."Of course you realize, Adelaide, that in suggesting this you're insinuating the most shocking things against Miss Viner?""When I say that if you part two young things who are dying to be happy in the lawful way it's ten to one they'll come together in an unlawful one? I'm insinuating shocking things against YOU, Lucretia Mary, in suggesting for a moment that you'll care to assume such a responsibility before your Maker.And you wouldn't, if you talked things straight out with him, instead of merely sending him messages through a miserable sinner like yourself!"Darrow expected this assault on her adopted creed to provoke in Madame de Chantelle an explosion of pious indignation;but to his surprise she merely murmured: "I don't know what Mr.Darrow'll think of you!""Mr.Darrow probably knows his Bible as well as I do," Miss Painter calmly rejoined; adding a moment later, without the least perceptible change of voice or expression: "I suppose you've heard that Gisele de Folembray's husband accuses her of being mixed up with the Duc d'Arcachon in that business of trying to sell a lot of imitation pearls to Mrs.Homer Pond, the Chicago woman the Duke's engaged to? It seems the jeweller says Gisele brought Mrs.Pond there, and got twenty-five per cent--which of course she passed on to d'Arcachon.The poor old Duchess is in a fearful state--so afraid her son'll lose Mrs.Pond! When I think that Gisele is old Bradford Wagstaff's grand-daughter, I'm thankful he's safe in Mount Auburn!"XXII
It was not until late that afternoon that Darrow could claim his postponed hour with Anna.When at last he found her alone in her sitting-room it was with a sense of liberation so great that he sought no logical justification of it.He simply felt that all their destinies were in Miss Painter's grasp, and that, resistance being useless, he could only enjoy the sweets of surrender.
Anna herself seemed as happy, and for more explicable reasons.She had assisted, after luncheon, at another debate between Madame de Chantelle and her confidant, and had surmised, when she withdrew from it, that victory was permanently perched on Miss Painter's banners.
