The Baroness examined her next letter for a moment before opening it and if she, too, had received her sting, she abandoned nothing.
She answered with complete, though perhaps ominous, mildness: "He is rather like Shelley, I always think, a sophisticated Shelley who had sat at the feet of Pater. Shelley, too, had swarms of children, and it is possible that they were large-mouthed. The plebeian origin that you tell me of rather attracts me. I care, especially, for the fine flame that mounts from darkness; and I, too, on one side, as you will remember, ma bonne, am du peuple."
"My dear Mercedes! Your father was an artist, a man of genius; and if your parents had risen from the gutter, you, by your own genius, transcend the question of rank as completely as a Shakespeare."
The continued mildness was alarming Miss Scrotton; an eagerness to make amends was in her eye.
"Ah—but did he, poor man!" Madame von Marwitz mused, rather irrelevantly, her eyes on her letter. "One hears now, not. But thank you, my Scrotton, you mean to be consoling. I have, however, no dread of the gutter. Tiens," she turned a page, "here is news indeed."
Miss Scrotton had now taken a chair beside her and her fingers tapped a little impatiently as the Baroness's eye—far from the thought of pearls and swine—went over the letter.
"Tiens, tiens," Madame von Marwitz repeated; "the little Karen is sought in marriage."
"Really," said Miss Scrotton, "how very fortunate for the poor little thing. Who is the young man, and how, in heaven's name, has she secured a young man in the wilds of Cornwall?"
Madame von Marwitz made no reply. She was absorbed in another letter. And Miss Scrotton now perceived, with amazement and indignation, that the one laid down was written in the hand of Gregory Jardine.
"You don't mean to tell me," Miss Scrotton said, after some moments of hardly held patience, "that it's Gregory?"