"Jealous, my dear Mercedes?" Miss Scrotton's emotion showed itself in a dark flush. "_Mais oui; mais oui_; you tell me that my friend is a swine. Does that not mean that you, of late, have received too few pearls?" "My dear Mercedes! Who called him a swine?" "One doesn't speak of scattered pearls without rousing these associations." Her tone was beaming. Was it possible to swallow such an affront? Was it possible not to? And she had brought it upon herself. There was comfort and a certain restoration of dignity in this thought. Miss Scrotton, struggling inwardly, feigned lightness. "So few of us are worthy of your pearls, dear. Unworthiness doesn't, I hope, consign us to the porcine category. Perhaps it is that being, like him, a little person, I'm able to see Mr. Drew's merits and demerits more impartially than you do. That is all. I really ought to know a good deal about Mr. Drew," Miss Scrotton pursued, regaining more self-control, now that she had steered her way out of the dreadful shoals where her friend's words had threatened to sink her; "I've known him since the days when he was at Oxford and I used to stay there with my uncle the Dean. He was sitting, then, at the feet of Pater. It's a derivative, a _parvenu_ talent, and, I do feel it, I confess I do, a derivative personality altogether, like that of so many of these clever young men nowadays. He is, you know, of anything but distinguished antecedents, and his reaction from his own _milieu_ has been, perhaps, from the first, a little marked. Unfortunately his marriage is there to remind people of it, and I never see Mr. Drew _dans le monde_ without, irrepressibly, thinking of the dismal little wife in Surbiton whom I once called upon, and his swarms--but swarms, my dear--of large-mouthed children." Miss Scrotton wondered, as she proceeded, whether she had again too far abandoned discretion. The Baroness examined her next letter for a moment before opening it and if she, too, had received her sting, she abandoned nothing. She answered with complete, though perhaps ominous, mildness: "He is rather like Shelley, I always think, a sophisticated Shelley who had sat at the feet of Pater. Shelley, too, had swarms of children, and it is possible that they were large-mouthed. The plebeian origin that you tell me of rather attracts me. I care, especially, for the fine flame that mounts from darkness; and I, too, on one side, as you will remember, _ma bonne_, am _du peuple_." "My dear Mercedes! Your father was an artist, a man of genius; and if your parents had risen from the gutter, you, by your own genius, transcend the question of rank as completely as a Shakespeare." The continued mildness was alarming Miss Scrotton; an eagerness to make amends was in her eye.