xcellently. The men were warmly pleased. They
sat up and smiled and glistened at him. Once he stopped short and threw
Madame Beattie a quick aside.

"What are they laughing at?"

"I have to put it picturesquely," said Madame Beattie, in a stately
calm. "That's the only way they'll understand. Go on."

It is said in Addington that those lectures lasted even until eleven
o'clock at night, and there were petitions that The Prisoner should go
to the old hall and talk every evening, instead of twice a week. The
Woman's Club said Madame Beattie was a dear to interpret for him, and
some of the members who had not studied any language since the
seventies, when they learned the rudiments of German, to read Faust,
judged it would be a good idea to hear her for practice. But somebody
told her that, and she discouraged it. She was obliged, she said, to
skip hastily from one dialect to another and they would only be
confused; therefore they thought it better, after all, to remain
undisturbed in their respective calm. Jeff sailed securely on through
Lincoln's administration to the present day, and took up the tariff
even, in an elementary fashion. There he was obliged to be drily
technical at points, and he wondered how Madame Beattie could accurately
reproduce him, much less to a response of eager faces. But then Jeff
knew she was an old witch. He knew she had hypnotised wives that hated
her and husbands sworn to cast her off. He knew she had sung after she
had no voice, and bamboozled even the critics, all but one who wrote for
an evening paper and so didn't do his notice until next day. And he saw
no reason why she should not make even the tariff a primrose path.

Madame Beattie loved it all. Also, there was the exquisite pleasure,
when she got home late, of making Sophy let her in and mix her a
refreshing drink, and of meeting Esther the next day at dinner and
telling her what a good house they had. Business, Madame Beattie called
it, splendid business, and Esther hated her for that, too. It sounded
like shoes or hosiery. But Ether didn't dare gainsay her, for fear she
would put out a palmist's sign, or a notice of seances at twenty-five
cents a head. Esther knew she could get no help from grandmother. When
she sought it, with tears in her eyes, begging grandmother to turn the
unprincipled old witch out for good, grandmother only pulled the sheet
up to her ears and breathed stertorously.

But Madame Beattie was tired, though