“She wrote so kindly,” said Mrs. Bradley. “She understood, I know, how much we hoped to see you here, how much pleasure it would give us. I wish she could have come, too. Owen so often wrote about you both, from Cannes. He said you made him think of Jeanne d’Arc, and your mother of Madame Récamier.—I’m glad you still do your hair like that,” said Mrs. Bradley, smiling shyly, and Alix saw that she had forgotten nothing and that all the links that Giles had ignored were cherished by her. There were links, however, that she would not see. That must be, Alix reflected, what she had felt as her innocence. The pleasure that her coming might give to the Bradleys had never been part of Maman’s motive. She had taken it for granted, but it had not counted. Maman had sent her because she had conceived of the winter in England as an advantage for her child and because—Alix saw further into these motives than Maman intended her to do—it had not been convenient to take her to Cannes. But there were few of Maman’s motives, Alix felt, as she listened to the gentle, hesitating voice, that Mrs. Bradley would divine. Perhaps it was that that made Maman seem so much the older. Yet Maman, too, might have blindnesses. She would have been blind, for instance, in saying of Mrs. Bradley—and Alix could hear her saying it: “_Un peu bê-bête, n’est-ce pas, ma chérie?_” Mrs. Bradley was simple, very simple; but she was not _bête_. Alix felt that she understood Mrs. Bradley as Maman would not understand her, and it was perhaps because of this that Mrs. Bradley spoke presently about her dead son, for to any one who did not understand her she could not have spoken. She would never be _bête_ about things like that. She was longing to speak about him, Alix saw; to ask questions, to reënforce her store of precious memories by such fragments as the little French girl could offer her. Alix told her of their walks above the sea at Cannes, of the concerts he had so loved, and of how much he had had to tell and teach them of flowers and birds.