r is with her young
man. That is the correct phrase, is it not?"

She was a great lady, who stood nearly six foot high, and whom one would
have styled buxom, had one dared. "I have a grievance," she went on; "I
must talk to someone. Come this way. _There_!" She pointed with the
handle of her glasses to a pen of glossy blackbirds. "You see!... Not
even commended!--and I assure you the trouble I have taken over them,
with the idea of setting an example to the tenantry, is incredible. They
give a prize to one of our own tenants ... which is as much as telling
the man that he is an example to _me_. Then they wonder that the country
is going to the dogs. I assure you that after breakfast I have had the
scraps collected from the plates--that was the course recommended by the
poultry manuals--and have taken them out with my own hands."

The sort of thing passed for humour in the county, and, being delivered
with an air and a half Irish ruefulness, passed well enough.

"And that reminds me," she went on, "--I mean the fact that the country
is going to the dogs, as my husband [You haven't seen him anywhere, have
you? He is one of the judges, and I want to have a word with him about
my Orpingtons] says every morning after he has looked at his paper--that
... oh, that you have been in Paris, haven't you? with your aunt. Then,
of course, you have seen this famous Duc de Mersch?"

She looked at me humourously through her glasses. "I'm going to pump
you, you know," she said, "it is the duty that is expected of me. I have
to talk for a countyful of women without a tongue in their heads. So
tell me about him. Is it true that he is at the bottom of all this
mischief? Is it through him that this man committed suicide? They say
so. He _was_ mixed up in that Royalist plot, wasn't he?--and the people
that have been failing all over the place _are_ mixed up with him,
aren't they?"

"I ... I really don't know," I said; "if you say so...."

"Oh, I assure you I'm sound enough," she answered, "the Churchills--I
know you're a friend of his--haven't a stauncher ally than I am, and I
should only be too glad to be able to contradict. But it's so difficult.
I assure you I go out of my way; talk to the most outrageous people,
deny the very possibility of Mr. Churchill's being in any way
implicated. One knows that it's impossible, but what can one do? I have
said again and again--to people like grocers' wives; even to the
grocers, for that matter