Miss Scrotton was struggling with a half formulated sense of grievance. It was she who had brought Madame von Marwitz and the Aspreys together. Madame von Marwitz already knew, of course, most of the people in America who were worth knowing; if she hadn't met them there she had met them in Europe; but the Aspreys she had, till then, never met, and they had been, indisputably, Miss Scrotton's possession. Miss Scrotton had known them slightly for several years; her father and Mr. Asprey had corresponded on some sociological theme and the Aspreys had called on him in London in a mood of proper deference and awe. She had written to the Aspreys before sailing with Mercedes, had found that they were wintering in Egypt, but would be back in America in Spring, ready to receive Madame von Marwitz and herself with open arms; and within those arms she had, a week ago, placed her treasure. No doubt someone else would have done it if she hadn't; and perhaps she had been too eager in her determination that no one else should do it. Perhaps she was altogether a little too eager. Madame von Marwitz liked people to care for her and showed a pretty gratitude for pains endured on her behalf; at least she usually did so; but it may well have been that the great woman, at once vaguely aloof and ironically observant, had become a little irked, or bored, or merely amused at hearing so continually, as it were, her good Scrotton panting beside her, tense, determined and watchful of opportunity. However that may have been, Miss Scrotton, as Madame von Marwitz's glance now lifted and rested upon herself, detected the sharper gaiety defined by the French as "_malice_," lighting, though ever so mildly, her friend's eyes and lips. Like most devotees Miss Scrotton had something of the valet in her composition, and with the valet's capacity for obsequiousness went a valet-like shrewdness of perception. She hadn't spent four months travelling about America with Madame von Marwitz without seeing her in undress. She had long since become uncomfortably aware that when Madame von Marwitz found one a little ridiculous she could be unkind, and that when one added plaintiveness to folly she often amused herself by giving one, to speak metaphorically, soft yet sharp little pinches that left one nervously uncertain of whether a caress or an aggression had been intended.