"Par exemple!" said Madame von Marwitz with a short laugh. She raised herself to give her pillow a blow and turning on her side and contemplating more directly her ancient monitress she said, "I sometimes wonder what I keep you here for."
"I do, too, sometimes," said Mrs. Talcott, "and I make it out that you need me."
"I make it out," Madame von Marwitz repeated the phrase with a noble dignity of manner, "that I am too kind of heart, too aware of what I owe you in gratitude, to resent, as I have every right to do, the license you allow yourself in speaking to me."
"Yes; you'll always get plain speaking from me, Mercedes," Mrs. Talcott remarked, "just as long as you have anything to do with me."
"Indeed I shall. I am but too well aware of the fact," said Madame von Marwitz, "and I only tolerate it because of our life-long tie."
"You'll go on tolerating it, I guess, Mercedes. You'd feel mighty queer, I expect, if the one person in the world who knew you through and through and had stood by you through everything wasn't there to fall back on."
"I deny that you know me through and through," Madame von Marwitz declared, but with a drop from her high manner; sulkily rather than with conviction. "You have always seen me with the eye of a lizard." Her simile amused her and she suddenly laughed. "You have somewhat the vision of a lizard, Tallie. You scrutinize the cracks and the fissures, but of the mountain itself you are unaware. I have cracks and fissures, no doubt, like all the rest of our sad humanity; but, bon Dieu!—I am a mountain, and you, Tallie," she went on, laughing softly, "are a lizard on the mountain. As for Mr. Jardine, he is a mole. But if you think that Karen will be happier burrowing underground with him than here with me, I will do my best. Yes;" she reflected; "I will write to Mrs. Forrester. She shall see the mole and tell him that when he sends me an apology I send him Karen. It is a wild thing to leave one's husband like this. I will make her see it."
"Now you see here, Mercedes," said Mrs. Talcott, rising and fixing an acute gaze upon her, "don't you go and make things worse than they are. Don't you go interfering between Karen and her husband. The first move's got to come from them. I don't trust you round the corner where your vanity comes in, and I guess what you've got in your mind now is that you'd like to make it out to your friends how you've tried to reconcile Karen and her husband after he's treated you so bad. If you want to tell Karen that he was right in all the things he believed about you and that this isn't the first time by a long shot that you've wrecked people with your jealousy, and that he loves her ten times more than you do, that's a different thing, and I'll stand by you through it. But I won't have you meddling any more with those two poor young things, so you may as well take it in right here."
Madame von Marwitz's good humour fell away. "And for you, may I ask you kindly to mind your own business?" she demanded.
"I'll make this affair of Karen's my business if you ain't real careful, Mercedes," said Mrs. Talcott, standing solid and thick and black, in the centre of the room. "Yes, you'd better go slow and sure or you'll find there are some things I can't put up with. This affair of Karen has made me feel pretty sick, I can tell you. I've seen you do a sight of mean things in your life, but I don't know as I've seen you do a meaner. I guess," Mrs. Talcott continued, turning her eyes on the evening sea outside, "it would make your friends sit up—all these folks who admire you so much—if they could know a thing or two you've done."