"Because Esther made that row? absurd! It's Susan's house." "I'm not likely to go into it," said Jeff drily, "unless I am summoned." "She's a fool." "But I don't mind telling you where I was going," said Jeff. "I was going to lick Weedon Moore--or the equivalent." "Not on account of my interview?" said Madame Beattie, laughing very far down in her anatomy. Her deep laugh, Jeff always felt, could only have been attained by adequate support in the diaphragm. "Bless you, dear boy, you needn't blame him. I went to him. Went to his office. Blame me." "Oh, I blame you all right," said Jeff, "but you're not a responsible person. A chap that owns a paper is." "I wish you'd met him," she said, in great enjoyment. "Where'd he go, Jeffrey? Can't we find him now?" "I suspect he went to the old circus-ground. I caught him there talking to Poles and Finns and Italians and Greeks, telling them the country was no good and they owned it." "Why, the fellow can't speak to them." Madame Beattie, being a fluent linguist, had natural scorn of a tubby little New Englander who said "ma'am ". "Oh, he had an interpreter." "We'll drive along there," said Madame Beattie. "You tell Denny. I should dearly like to see them. Poles, do you say? I didn't know there were such people in town." Jeffrey, rather curious himself, told Denny, and they bowled cumbrously along. He felt in a way obliged to proffer a word or two about the interview. "What the devil made you do it anyway?" he asked her; but Madame Beattie chuckled and would not answer. XXI All the way along, in the warm twilight, Madame Beattie was gay over the prospect of being fought for. With the utmost precision and unflagging spirit she arranged a plausible cause for combat, and Jeffrey, not in the least intending to play his allotted part, yet enjoyed the moment fully. "You shall do it," Madame Beattie assured him, as if she permitted him to enter upon a task for which there was wide competition. "You shall thrash him, and he will put it in his paper, and the European papers will copy." "I haven't much idea the _Argosy_ is read in foreign capitals," Jeff felt bound to assure her. "Oh, but we can cable it. The French journals--they used to be very good to me." With that her face darkened, not in a softening melancholy, but old bitterness and defeat. She was not always able to ignore the contrast between the spring of youth and this meagre eld. Jeffrey saw the tremendous recognition she assuredly had had, grown through the illusive fructifying of memory into something overwhelming, and he was glad starved vanity might once more be fed. She seemed to him a most piteous spectacle, youth and power in ruins, and age too poor to nourish even a vine to drape the crumbling walls. "Patricia Beattie," she continued, "again a _casus belli_. Combat between two men--" "There won't be any combat," Jeff reminded her. "If I kick Weedie, he'll take it lying down. That's Weedie."