"No; really; for a tour?"
"Yes; through the States. We shall be gone till next summer. I know several very charming people in New York and Boston and can help to make it pleasant for Mercedes. Of course for me it is the opportunity of a life-time. Quite apart from her music, she is the most remarkable woman I have ever known."
"She's clever?"
"Clever is too trivial a word. Her genius goes through everything. We read a great deal together—Dante, Goethe, French essayists, our English poets. To hear her read poetry is almost as wonderful an experience as to hear her play. Isn't it an extraordinary face? One sees it all in her face, I think."
"She is very unusual looking."
"Her face," Miss Scrotton pursued, ignoring her companion's trite comments, "embodies the thoughts and dreams of many races. It makes me always think of Pater's Mona Lisa—you remember: 'Hers is the head upon which all the ends of the world are come and the eyelids are a little weary.' She is, of course, a profoundly tragic person."
"Has she been very unfortunate?"
"Unfortunate indeed. Her youth was passed in bitter poverty; her first marriage was disastrous, and when joy came at last in an ideal second marriage it was shattered by her husband's mysterious death. Yes; he was drowned; found drowned in the lake on their estate in Germany. Mercedes has never been there since. She has never recovered. She is a broken-hearted woman. She sees life as a dark riddle. She counts herself as one of the entombed."
"Dear me," Gregory murmured.
Miss Scrotton glanced at him with some sharpness; but finding his blue eyes fixed abstractedly on Karen Woodruff exonerated him from intending to be disagreeable. "Her childlessness has been a final grief," she added; "a child, as she has often told me, would be a resurrection from the dead."