One of the great ladies surveyed me as I stood in the centre of an open space, surveyed me through tortoise-shell glasses on the end of a long handle, and beckoned me to her side. "You are unattached?" she asked. She had pretensions to voice the county, just as my aunt undoubtedly set the tone of its doings, decided who was visitable, and just as Miss Churchill gave the political tone. "You may wait upon me, then," she said; "my daughter is with her young man. That is the correct phrase, is it not?" She was a great lady, who stood nearly six foot high, and whom one would have styled buxom, had one dared. "I have a grievance," she went on; "I must talk to someone. Come this way. _There_!" She pointed with the handle of her glasses to a pen of glossy blackbirds. "You see!... Not even commended!--and I assure you the trouble I have taken over them, with the idea of setting an example to the tenantry, is incredible. They give a prize to one of our own tenants ... which is as much as telling the man that he is an example to _me_. Then they wonder that the country is going to the dogs. I assure you that after breakfast I have had the scraps collected from the plates--that was the course recommended by the poultry manuals--and have taken them out with my own hands." The sort of thing passed for humour in the county, and, being delivered with an air and a half Irish ruefulness, passed well enough. "And that reminds me," she went on, "--I mean the fact that the country is going to the dogs, as my husband [You haven't seen him anywhere, have you? He is one of the judges, and I want to have a word with him about my Orpingtons] says every morning after he has looked at his paper--that ... oh, that you have been in Paris, haven't you? with your aunt. Then, of course, you have seen this famous Duc de Mersch?" She looked at me humourously through her glasses. "I'm going to pump you, you know," she said, "it is the duty that is expected of me. I have to talk for a countyful of women without a tongue in their heads. So tell me about him. Is it true that he is at the bottom of all this mischief? Is it through him that this man committed suicide? They say so. He _was_ mixed up in that Royalist plot, wasn't he?--and the people that have been failing all over the place _are_ mixed up with him, aren't they?" "I ... I really don't know," I said; "if you say so...."