"Swayed?" Mrs. Forrester questioned.
"Oh, but yes, indeed. He managed the whole thing—and when I think that he would in all probability never have seen the Aspreys if it had not been for me!—Mercedes had him asked there, you know; they are very, but very, very fashionable people, they know everybody worth knowing all over the world. I needn't tell you that, of course. But it was all arranged, he and Mercedes, and Lady Rose and the Marquis de Hautefeuille, and a young American couple—with the Aspreys in the background as universal providers—it made a little group where I was plainly de trop. Mr. Drew planned everything with her. She is to have her piano and he is to write a book under her aegis. And they are to live in the pinewoods with the most elaborate simplicity. However, I am sure the Adirondacks will soon bore her."
"And how soon will Mr. Drew bore her?" asked Mrs. Forrester, who had listened to these rather pitiful revelations with, now and then, a slight elevation of her intelligent eyebrows.
The question gave Miss Scrotton an opportunity for almost ominous emphasis; she paused over it, holding Mrs. Forrester with a brooding eye.
"He won't bore her," she then brought out.
"What, never? never?" Mrs. Forrester questioned gaily.
"Never, never," Miss Scrotton repeated. "He is too clever. He will keep her interested—and uncertain."
"Well," Mrs. Forrester returned, as if this were all to the good, "it is a comfort to think that the poor darling has found a distraction."
"You feel it that? I wish I could. I wish I could feel it anything but an infatuation. If only he weren't so much the type of a great woman's folly; if only he weren't so of the region of whispers. It isn't like our wonderful Sir Alliston; one sees her there standing high on a mountain peak with the winds of heaven about her. To see her with Mr. Drew is like seeing her through some ambiguous, sticky fog. Oh, I can't deny that it has all made me very, very unhappy." Tears blinked in Miss Scrotton's eyes.
Mrs. Forrester was kind, she leaned forward and patted Miss Scrotton's hand, she smiled reassuringly, and she refused, for a moment, to share her anxiety. "No, no, no," she said, "you are troubling yourself quite needlessly, my dear Eleanor. Mercedes is amusing herself and the young man is an interesting young man; she has talked to me and written to me about him. And I think she needed distraction just now, I think this marriage of little Karen's has affected her a good deal. The child is of course connected in her mind with so much that is dear and tragic in the past."