I shall not stand in his way.
It would be a profound relief to me were he to get her back."

"I can see that well enough. But how'll you help standing in his way?
The only thing you could do to get out of his way would be to help Karen
to be quit of you. Make her see that you're just as bad as he thinks
you. I guess if you told her some things about yourself she'd begin to
see that her husband wasn't so far wrong about you."

"_Par exemple!_" said Madame von Marwitz with a short laugh. She raised
herself to give her pillow a blow and turning on her side and
contemplating more directly her ancient monitress she said, "I sometimes
wonder what I keep you here for."

"I do, too, sometimes," said Mrs. Talcott, "and I make it out that you
need me."

"I make it out," Madame von Marwitz repeated the phrase with a noble
dignity of manner, "that I am too kind of heart, too aware of what I owe
you in gratitude, to resent, as I have every right to do, the license
you allow yourself in speaking to me."

"Yes; you'll always get plain speaking from me, Mercedes," Mrs. Talcott
remarked, "just as long as you have anything to do with me."

"Indeed I shall. I am but too well aware of the fact," said Madame von
Marwitz, "and I only tolerate it because of our life-long tie."

"You'll go on tolerating it, I guess, Mercedes. You'd feel mighty queer,
I expect, if the one person in the world who knew you through and
through and had stood by you through everything wasn't there to fall
back on."

"I deny that you know me through and through," Madame von Marwitz
declared, but with a drop from her high manner; sulkily rather than with
conviction. "You have always seen me with the eye of a lizard." Her
simile amused her and she suddenly laughed. "You have somewhat the
vision of a lizard, Tallie. You scrutinize the cracks and the fissures,
but of the mountain itself you are unaware. I have cracks and fissures,
no doubt, like all the rest of our sad humanity; but, _bon Dieu!_--I am
a mountain, and you, Tallie," she went on, laughing softly, "are a
lizard on the mountain. As for Mr. Jardine, he is a mole. But if you
think that Karen will be happier burrowing underground with him than
here with me, I will do my best. Yes;" she reflected; "I will write to
Mrs. Forrester. She shall see the mole and tell him that when he sends
me an apology I send him Karen. It is a wild thing to leave one's
husband like this. I will make her see it."

"Now you