“You are a careful chaperone, I see,” observed a deep, well-trained English voice at her elbow.
Miss Campbell turned quickly. It was Mrs. Paxton-Steele leaning heavily on her stick. Elinor could not keep from looking at that stick with much curiosity. Edward Paxton had told her that the old lady had numbers of canes which her man servant packed around in a case like golf sticks. It would have been interesting, she thought, to have been an unseen witness at that famous battle when the other Edward had seized the stick and broken it in half. She wondered if there had been a great clap of thunder and a flash of lightning, as there was when Siegfried smote the staff of Wotan.
Miss Campbell turned smiling. Her manners were always exquisite and she was not in the least afraid of the old bird of prey, as the girls had disrespectfully christened the war-like English lady.
“Ah, well,” she replied, “they are not my own. That is why I must be particularly careful of them. They are only borrowed children. One feels especially responsible for borrowed property, don’t you think?”
“They are all equally troublesome, my dear lady,” returned Mrs. Paxton-Steele, “whether they are one’s own or another’s. I assure you that bringing my three grandchildren with me to America was much more difficult than bringing three packages of Bohemian glass of the most expensive and brittle character. That is what they are, these young people, expensive and brittle. They have no stability—no strength.”
“With your permission, madam, I would like to introduce my four girls to you,” put in Miss Campbell proudly. “They are much more satisfactory than Bohemian glass and I can rely on them always.”
Elinor smiled to herself. The two ladies reminded her of an old baldheaded eagle in a garden hat and a silver pheasant in a lavender bonnet.
“Perhaps if you were suddenly deprived of your grandchildren, Madam,” went on the silver pheasant, “you would realize how much you really cared for them.”
The old eagle shrugged her shoulders and flapped the brim of her garden hat with a sort of fierce humor.
“Ah, but they are a problem, Madam, they are a problem. People should not bring children into the world and leave them for others to rear. I had hoped for a peaceful old age and I find neither peace nor rest.”