ing against her! I LIKED the girl, Mr.
Darrow...But what's that got to do with it? I don't want her to marry
my grandson. If I'd been looking for a wife for Owen, I shouldn't
have applied to the Farlows to find me one. That's what Anna won't
understand; and what you must help me to make her see."

Darrow, to this appeal, could oppose only the repeated assurance of his
inability to interfere. He tried to make Madame de Chantelle see
that the very position he hoped to take in the household made his
intervention the more hazardous. He brought up the usual arguments, and
sounded the expected note of sympathy; but Madame de Chantelle's alarm
had dispelled her habitual imprecision, and, though she had not many
reasons to advance, her argument clung to its point like a frightened
sharp-clawed animal.

"Well, then," she summed up, in response to his repeated assertions that
he saw no way of helping her, "you can, at least, even if you won't
say a word to the others, tell me frankly and fairly--and quite between
ourselves--your personal opinion of Miss Viner, since you've known her
so much longer than we have."

He protested that, if he had known her longer, he had known her much
less well, and that he had already, on this point, convinced Anna of his
inability to pronounce an opinion.

Madame de Chantelle drew a deep sigh of intelligence. "Your opinion of
Mrs. Murrett is enough! I don't suppose you pretend to conceal THAT? And
heaven knows what other unspeakable people she's been mixed up with. The
only friends she can produce are called Hoke...Don't try to reason with
me, Mr. Darrow. There are feelings that go deeper than facts...And
I KNOW she thought of studying for the stage..." Madame de Chantelle
raised the corner of her lace handkerchief to her eyes. "I'm
old-fashioned--like my furniture," she murmured. "And I thought I could
count on you, Mr. Darrow..."

When Darrow, that night, regained his room, he reflected with a flash
of irony that each time he entered it he brought a fresh troop of
perplexities to trouble its serene seclusion. Since the day after his
arrival, only forty-eight hours before, when he had set his window
open to the night, and his hopes had seemed as many as its stars,
each evening had brought its new problem and its renewed distress. But
nothing, as yet, had approached the blank misery of mind with which he
now set himself to face the fresh questions confronting him.

Sophy Viner had not show