"Ah, my dear, you are too generous to that young man," Miss Scrotton mused. "It's beautiful, it's wonderful to watch; but you are, indeed, too kind to him." She mused, she was absent, yet she knew, and knew that Mercedes knew, that never before in all their intercourse had she ventured on such a speech. It implied watchfulness; it implied criticism; it implied, even, anxiety; it implied all manner of things that it was not permitted for a satellite to say.
The Baroness's eyes were on her letter, and though she did not raise them her dark brows lifted. "Tiens," she continued, "you find that I am too kind to him?"
Miss Scrotton, to keep up the appearance of ingenuousness, was forced to further definition. "I don't think, darling, that in your sympathy, your solicitude, where young talent is concerned, you quite realize how much you give, how much you can be made use of. The man admires you, of course, and has, of course, talent of a sort. Yet, when I see you together, I confess that I receive sometimes the impression of a scattering of pearls."
Madame von Marwitz laid down her letter. "Ah! ah!—oh! oh!—ma bonne," she said. She laughed out. Her eyes were lit with dancing sparks. "Do you know you speak as if you were very, very jealous of this young man who is found so charming?"
"Jealous, my dear Mercedes?" Miss Scrotton's emotion showed itself in a dark flush.
"Mais oui; mais oui; you tell me that my friend is a swine. Does that not mean that you, of late, have received too few pearls?"
"My dear Mercedes! Who called him a swine?"
"One doesn't speak of scattered pearls without rousing these associations." Her tone was beaming.
Was it possible to swallow such an affront? Was it possible not to? And she had brought it upon herself. There was comfort and a certain restoration of dignity in this thought. Miss Scrotton, struggling inwardly, feigned lightness. "So few of us are worthy of your pearls, dear. Unworthiness doesn't, I hope, consign us to the porcine category. Perhaps it is that being, like him, a little person, I'm able to see Mr. Drew's merits and demerits more impartially than you do. That is all. I really ought to know a good deal about Mr. Drew," Miss Scrotton pursued, regaining more self-control, now that she had steered her way out of the dreadful shoals where her friend's words had threatened to sink her; "I've known him since the days when he was at Oxford and I used to stay there with my uncle the Dean. He was sitting, then, at the feet of Pater. It's a derivative, a parvenu talent, and, I do feel it, I confess I do, a derivative personality altogether, like that of so many of these clever young men nowadays. He is, you know, of anything but distinguished antecedents, and his reaction from his own milieu has been, perhaps, from the first, a little marked. Unfortunately his marriage is there to remind people of it, and I never see Mr. Drew dans le monde without, irrepressibly, thinking of the dismal little wife in Surbiton whom I once called upon, and his swarms—but swarms, my dear—of large-mouthed children."
Miss Scrotton wondered, as she proceeded, whether she had again too far abandoned discretion.