category.
Perhaps it is that being, like him, a little person, I'm able to see Mr.
Drew's merits and demerits more impartially than you do. That is all. I
really ought to know a good deal about Mr. Drew," Miss Scrotton pursued,
regaining more self-control, now that she had steered her way out of the
dreadful shoals where her friend's words had threatened to sink her;
"I've known him since the days when he was at Oxford and I used to stay
there with my uncle the Dean. He was sitting, then, at the feet of
Pater. It's a derivative, a _parvenu_ talent, and, I do feel it, I
confess I do, a derivative personality altogether, like that of so many
of these clever young men nowadays. He is, you know, of anything but
distinguished antecedents, and his reaction from his own _milieu_ has
been, perhaps, from the first, a little marked. Unfortunately his
marriage is there to remind people of it, and I never see Mr. Drew _dans
le monde_ without, irrepressibly, thinking of the dismal little wife in
Surbiton whom I once called upon, and his swarms--but swarms, my
dear--of large-mouthed children."

Miss Scrotton wondered, as she proceeded, whether she had again too far
abandoned discretion.

The Baroness examined her next letter for a moment before opening it and
if she, too, had received her sting, she abandoned nothing.

She answered with complete, though perhaps ominous, mildness: "He is
rather like Shelley, I always think, a sophisticated Shelley who had sat
at the feet of Pater. Shelley, too, had swarms of children, and it is
possible that they were large-mouthed. The plebeian origin that you tell
me of rather attracts me. I care, especially, for the fine flame that
mounts from darkness; and I, too, on one side, as you will remember, _ma
bonne_, am _du peuple_."

"My dear Mercedes! Your father was an artist, a man of genius; and if
your parents had risen from the gutter, you, by your own genius,
transcend the question of rank as completely as a Shakespeare."

The continued mildness was alarming Miss Scrotton; an eagerness to make
amends was in her eye.

"Ah--but did he, poor man!" Madame von Marwitz mused, rather
irrelevantly, her eyes on her letter. "One hears now, not. But thank
you, my Scrotton, you mean to be consoling. I have, however, no dread of
the gutter. _Tiens_," she turned a page, "here is news indeed."

Miss Scrotton had now taken a chair beside her and her fingers tapped a
little impatiently as the Baroness's