"Good heavens! Another week! Not if I know it."
"Yes; it's awful, I know; but not as bad as it might have been. You won't have to talk to Miss Tancred. By the way, she says you are the only man who ever tried to talk to her—to understand her. What a dreadful light on her past! Think what her life must have been."
"Not very amusing, I imagine."
"Amusing! Think of it. Thirty years in this hole, where you can't breathe, and without a soul to speak to except the Colonel. Not that the Colonel is a soul—he's much too dense."
"To be anything but a body?"
"And all the time she has loathed it—loathed it. You see, she's got cosmopolitan blood in her veins. Her mother—you know about her mother?"
"I know nothing about her except that she did a great many bad things—I mean pictures—for which I hope Heaven may forgive her."
"Don't be brutal. She's dead now and can't do any more. When she was alive she was a Russian or a Pole or something funny, and mad on traveling, always going from one place to another—a regular rolling stone; till one day she rolled up to the Colonel's feet, and then——"
"He picked her up and put her in his pocket, and she never rolled any further. He packed her off to England and made her sit in this dreadful old family seat of his till she died of it. That's the sort of woman Miss Tancred's mother was, and Miss Tancred takes after her mother. She's a cosmopolitan, too."