"But tell me, Brun," he said, "you go on so fast. As I understand you there are these two, Breton and the girl, both of them the result of tragedies.... Do they know one another, do you suppose?"
"No. The girl was only a small child when Breton was in England, and you can be sure that she was carefully kept out of his way. But now that he's back ... now that he's back!"
"It's the girl that interests me!" said Arkwright.
"Oh! the girl!" Brun was almost contemptuous. "There you go—English sentiment—missing all the time the great thing, the splendid thing."
"Explain," Arkwright said, laughing; "I know you won't be happy until you have."
"Why—it's the Duchess, the Duchess, the Duchess all the time. She's the centre of the picture; she is the picture. She's the subject."
Arkwright said nothing. Brun tossed his hands in the air.
"Oh—you English! No wonder you're centuries behind everything—you miss the very things under your nose. There's the Duchess, sitting there—a great figure as she has been these sixty years, but a figure hidden, veiled. There she has been for the last thirty years, shut up in that great house, wrapped about and concealed. Nobody knows what the matter was—I don't know. I should think Christopher's the only man who can tell. At any rate, thirty years ago she retired altogether from the world, and sees only the fewest of people. But all the ceremony goes on, dressing up, receiving, and the influence she has! She was powerful enough before she disappeared, but since! Why, there's no pie she hasn't her finger in: politics, society, revolution, life, death; nothing goes on without her knowledge, her approval, her disapproval——"
"Her family, poor dears!"
"Oh; they love it—at any rate, the ones who are left do. The rebels are the younger generation. Society in England, my dear Arkwright, is dissolved into three divisions—the Autocrats, the Aristocrats, and the Democrats. I take my hat off to the Aristocrats—the Chichesters, the Medleys, the Darrants, the Weddons. All those quiet, decorous people, poor as mice many of them, standing aside altogether from any movements or war-cries of the day, living in their quiet little houses, or their empty big ones, clever some of them, charitable all of them, but never asserting their position or estimating it. They never look about them and see where they are. They've no need to. They're just there.