-but he's very much upset by it. Nicholas and Armandine do
nothing but worry about their poor little Pierre, who hasn't given a
sign of life for three months now--so I fear you will have to be very
patient and very indulgent guests."

The delightful old lady led us to our room, "the psyche room" we, the
youngsters, used to call it on account of the charming grisaille wall
paper, dating from the end of the Empire period, and representing in
somewhat stiff but none the less enchanting manner the amorous
adventures of that goddess.

I have always had a secret feeling that many a time, urged by her
confessor, Madame de C. had been upon the point of obliterating or
removing those extremely chaste nude images. But at the last moment
rose up the horror of voluntarily changing anything in the homestead,
transforming a whole room that she always had known thus, and perhaps
the unavowed fear of our ridicule and reproach, had made her renounce
her project.

"Brush up quickly, and come right down to tea. We've got so many
things to talk over. You've so much to tell me!"

So a quarter of an hour later, tea-cup in hand, we must needs go into
the details of our trips, inform her of our hopes and fears, tell of
all the different things we had seen--what America was going to
do--what it had already accomplished. And with her marvellously quick
understanding, her vivacious intelligence, the old lady classified the
facts and the anecdotes, asked us to repeat dates and numbers, that she
might the better retain them in her splendid memory.

All through dinner and the long evening she plied us with questions,
kept the conversation running along the same lines, returning now and
then to a certain theme, or certain figures, and asking us to go into
even more detail.

"I know I'm an abominable old egoist," at length she apologised. "But
you'd forgive me if only you realised how much happiness your stories
will bring, and to how many people. I imagine that you haven't had
much time for correspondence with our family--but that's all an old
woman like myself is good for these days."

"Our family" consisted in relationship to the 'nth degree of all the
H's, de C's, B's and F's that were then in existence, some of them such
distant cousins that Aunt Rose herself would never have recognised them
had they met. And besides these people there were her friends, her
servants, her farmers, possibly a group of three hundred persons with
who