not keep
her curiosity out of her eyes, and Miss Field smilingly answered it.

"She's absorbed him so! You see he watches her all the time. She's like
an endless play to him. He really doesn't care for anything else--he
doesn't want anything else. Of course they're very rich. But he might
have done something in politics, if she hadn't been so much more
important than he. And then, naturally, she's made enemies--powerful
enemies. Her friends come here of course--her old cronies--the people
who can put up with her. They're devoted to her. And the young
people--the very modern ones--who think nice manners 'early Victorian,'
and like her rudeness for the sake of her cleverness. But the
rest!--What do you think she did at one of these parties last year?"

Doris could not help wishing to know.

"She took a fancy to ask a girl near here--the daughter of a clergyman,
a great friend of Lord Dunstable's, to come over for the Sunday. Lord
Dunstable had talked of the girl, and Rachel's always on the look-out
for cleverness; she hunts it like a hound! She met the young woman too
somewhere, and got the impression--I can't say how--that she would 'go.'
So on the Saturday morning she went over in her pony-carriage--broke in
on the little Rectory like a hurricane--of course you know the people
about here regard her as something semi-divine!--and told the girl she
had come to take her back to Crosby Ledgers for the Sunday. So the poor
child packed up, all in a flutter, and they set off together in the
pony-carriage--six miles. And by the time they had gone four Rachel had
discovered she had made a mistake--that the girl wasn't clever, and
would add nothing to the party. So she quietly told her that she was
afraid, after all, the party wouldn't suit her. And then she turned the
pony's head, and drove her straight home again!"

"Oh!" cried Doris, her cheeks red, her eyes aflame.

"Brutal, wasn't it?" said the other. "All the same, there are fine
things in Rachel. And in one point she's the most vulnerable of women!"

"Her son?" Doris ventured.

Miss Field shrugged her shoulders.

"He doesn't drink--he doesn't gamble--he doesn't spend money--he doesn't
run away with other people's wives. He's just nothing!--just incurably
empty and idle. He comes here very little. His mother terrifies him. And
since he was twenty-one he has a little money of his own. He hangs about
in studios and theatres. His mother doesn't know any of his friends.