realize that Mercedes was
once just plain Mrs. Baldwin Tanner, ain't it? It was a silly match and
no mistake. Well, it took two or three years to work it all out, and
Mercedes was twenty-five when she married the Baron. I didn't see much
of them for a while. They put me around in their houses to look after
things and be there when Mercedes wanted me. She'd found out she
couldn't get along without me in those two or three years. Mercedes was
the most beautiful creature alive at that time, I do believe, and all
Europe was wild about her. She and the Baron went about and she gave
concerts, and it was just a triumphal tour. But after a spell I began to
see that things weren't going smooth. Mercedes is the sort of person
who's never satisfied with what she's got. And the Baron was beginning
to find her out. My! I used to be sorry for that man. I'll never forget
his white, sick face the first time she flew out at him and made one of
her scenes. '_Emprisonne ma jeunesse_,'" Mrs. Talcott quoted with a
heavy accent. "That's what she said he'd done to her. He was twenty
years older than Mercedes, the Baron. Mercedes always liked to have men
who were in love with her hanging about, and that's what the trouble was
over. The more they cared the worse she treated them, and the Baron was
a very dignified man and didn't like having them around. And she was
dreadful jealous of him, too, and used to fly out at him if he so much
as looked at another woman; in her way I guess he was the person
Mercedes cared for most in all her life; she respected him, too, and she
knew he was as clever as she was and more so, and as for him, in spite
of everything, he always stayed in love with her. They used to have
reconciliations, and when he'd look at her sort of scornful and loving
and sad all together, it would make her go all to pieces. She'd throw
herself in his arms and cry and cry. No, she ain't all bad, Mercedes.
And she thought she could make things all right with him after she'd let
herself go; she depended on his caring for her so much and being sorry
for her. But I saw well enough as the years went on that he got more and
more depressed. He was a depressed man by nature, I reckon, and he read
a sight of philosophy of the gloomy kind--that writer Schopenhauer was a
favourite of his, I recollect, and Mercedes thought a sight of him,
too--and after ten years or so of Mercedes I expect the Baron was pretty
sick of life.

"Well, you came. You th