er," Miss Scrotton with some impatience replied;
"but she is none the less a burden. For a woman like Mercedes, with a
life over-full and a strength continually overtaxed, the care and
responsibility is an additional weight and weariness."

"Well, but if she misses children so much; this takes the place,"
Gregory objected.

"Takes the place," Miss Scrotton repeated, "of a child of her own? This
little nobody, and an uninteresting nobody, too? Oh, she is a good girl,
a very good girl; and she makes herself fairly useful in elementary
ways; but how can you imagine that such a tie can satisfy maternal
craving?"

"How does she make herself useful?" Gregory asked, waiving the question
of maternal cravings. He had vexed Miss Scrotton a good deal, but the
theme was one upon which she could not resist enlarging; anything
connected with Madame von Marwitz was for her of absorbing interest.

"Well, she is a great deal in Cornwall, at Mercedes's place there," she
informed him. "It's a wonderfully lovely place; Les Solitudes; Mercedes
built the house. Karen and old Mrs. Talcott look after the little farm
and keep things in order."

"Old Mrs. Talcott? Where does she come in?"

"Ah, that is another of Mercedes's romantic benevolences. Mrs. Talcott
is a sort of old pensioner; a distant family connection; the funniest
old American woman you can conceive of. She has been with Mercedes since
her childhood, and, like everybody else, she is so devotedly attached to
her that she regards it as a matter of course that she should be taken
care of by her for ever. The way Karen takes her advantages as a matter
of course has always vexed me just a little."

"Is Mrs. Talcott interesting?" Gregory pursued his questions with a
placid persistence that seemed to indicate real curiosity.

"Good heavens, no!" Miss Scrotton said. "The epitome of the commonplace.
She looks like some of the queer old American women one sees in the
National Gallery with Baedekers in their hands and bags at their belts;
fat, sallow, provincial, with defective grammar and horrible twangs; the
kind of American, you know," said Miss Scrotton, warming to her
description as she felt that she was amusing Gregory Jardine, "that the
other kind always tell you they never by any chance would meet at home."

"And what kind of American is Miss Woodruff? The other kind or Mrs.
Talcott's kind?"

"By the other kind I mean Lady Jardine's," said Miss Scrotton; "or--no;
she const