"That first descent after her long seclusion will be critical. She will need protection and advice."
"Her mother, Madame Vernois, is at hand," Adrian remarked, perhaps rather tentatively.
"Yes, a sweet person and a devoted mother; but a little conspicuously with the outlook and moral standards of a past generation. She is at once too charitable and too humble-minded to be a judge of character—one born to follow rather than to lead—and, though a woman of breeding and position, always a provincial. She followed Professor Vernois as long as he was here to follow. Then she followed her noble and needy relations away in Chambéry. Now she follows her beautiful daughter. And the daughter, in the near future, is going to be a mark for the archers—male and female. Already I have reason to believe that archery practice has begun. The sweet, timid mother, though perplexed and anxious, hasn't a notion how to turn those arrows aside."
Miss Beauchamp gazed into the shallow depths of her wine-glass.
"It's an unsavory subject," she continued, "and, I agree with you, Feminism has next to no legitimate excuse for existence here. That is just why, I imagine, it has allied itself with ideas and practices not precisely legitimate. It makes its appeal to by no means the most exalted elements of our very mixed human nature."
"Ah! but," Adrian broke out in a white heat of anger, "it is not possible! Such persons would never presume—"
"They have already presumed. Zélie de Gand, helped by I don't quite know who, though I have my suspicions, has approached Madame St. Leger. She is crazy to recover lost ground, to get herself and her clique reinstated. Madame St. Leger's beauty, brains, and her reputation—so absolutely unsullied and above suspicion—represent an immense asset to any cause she may embrace."
"But need she embrace any cause?"
"My dear young man," Miss Beauchamp returned, smiling rather broadly, "you had better take it for said, once and for all, that a beautiful young woman of seven and twenty, who is beginning the world afresh after being relieved of a not entirely satisfactory marriage, is perfectly certain to embrace—well—well—Something, if she doesn't embrace Somebody."
Presently, after a silence, Anastasia spoke again, gently and seriously.