Karen thought that she had misheard her last words. "When Tante is about?" she repeated. "You mean that dreadful things happen to her? That is one of the worst parts of it now, Mrs. Talcott—only that I am so selfish that I do not think of it enough—to know that I have added to Tante's troubles."
"No." Mrs. Talcott now said, and with a curious mildness and firmness. "No, that ain't what I mean. Mercedes has had a sight of trouble. I don't deny it, but that ain't what I mean. She makes trouble. She makes it for herself and she makes it for other people. There's always trouble going, of some sort or other, when Mercedes is about."
"I don't understand you, Mrs. Talcott," said Karen. An uncanny feeling had crept over her while the old woman spoke. It was as if, helplessly, she were listening to a sleep-walker who, in tranced unconsciousness, spoke forth mildly the hidden thought of his waking life.
"No, you don't understand, yet," said Mrs. Talcott. "Perhaps it's fair that you don't. Perhaps she can't help it. She was born so, I guess." Mrs. Talcott turned and walked towards the house.
The panic of the cliff was rising in Karen again. Mrs. Talcott was worse than the cliff and the unanswering immensities. She walked beside her, trying to control her terror.
"You mean, I think," she said, "that Tante is a tragic person and people who love her must suffer because of all that she has had to suffer."
"Yes, she's tragic all right," said Mrs. Talcott. "She's had about as bad a time as they make 'em—off and on. But she spoils things. And it makes me tired to see it going on. I've had too much of it," said Mrs. Talcott, "and if this can't come right—this between you and your nice young husband—I don't feel like I could get over it somehow." Leaning on Karen's arm with both hands she had paused and looked intently down at the path.
"But Mrs. Talcott," Karen's voice trembled; it was incredible, yet one was forced by Mrs. Talcott's whole demeanour to ask the question without indignation—"you speak as if you were blaming Tante for something. You do not blame her, do you?"
Mrs. Talcott still paused and still looked down, as if deeply pondering. "I've done a lot of thinking about that very point, Karen," she said. "And I don't know as I've made up my mind yet. It's a mighty intricate question. Perhaps we've all got only so much will-power and when most of it is ladled out into one thing there's nothing left to ladle out into the others. That's the way I try, sometimes, to figure it out to myself. Mercedes has got a powerful sight of will-power; but look at all she's got to use up in her piano-playing. There she is, working up to the last notch all the time, taking it out of herself, getting all wrought up. Well, to live so as you won't be spoiling things for other people needs about as much will-power as piano-playing, I guess, when you're as big a person as Mercedes and want as many things. And if you ain't got any will-power left you just do the easiest thing; you just take what you've a mind to; you just let yourself go in every other way to make up for the one way you held yourself in. That's how it is, perhaps."
"But Mrs. Talcott," said Karen in a low voice, "all this—about me and my husband—has come because Tante has thought too much of us and too little of herself. It would have been much easier for her to let us alone and not try and make Gregory like her. I do not recognise her in what you are saying. You are saying dreadful things."