Sophy admitted him and left him in the library, while she went to summon her. And Madame Beattie came, finding him at the window, his back turned on the warm breathing presences of Esther's home. If he had penetrated, for good cause, to Circe's bower, he didn't mean to drink in its subtle intimacies. At the sound of a step he turned, and Madame Beattie met him peaceably, with outstretched hand. Alston dropped the hand as soon as possible. Lydia might swear she was clean and that her peculiarily second-hand look was the effect of overworn black, but Alston she had always impressed as much-damaged goods that had lost every conceivable inviting freshness. She indicated a chair conveniently opposite her own and he sat down and at once began. "Madame Beattie, I have come to talk over this unfortunate matter of the necklace." "Oh," said Madame Beattie, with a perfect affability and no apparent emotion, "Anne French has been chattering to you." "Naturally," said Choate. "I am their counsel, hers and her sister's." "These aren't matters of law," said Madame Beattie. "They are very interesting personal questions, and I advise you to let them alone. You won't find any precedent for them in your books." "I have been unpardonably slow in coming to you," said Alston. "And my coming now hasn't so very much to do with Lydia and Anne. I might have come just the same if you hadn't begun to annoy them." "Well," said Madame Beattie impatiently. She wanted her nap, for she was due that evening at street corners in Mill End. "Get to the point, if you please." "The point is," said Alston, "that some months ago when you began to make things unpleasant for a number of persons--" "Nonsense!" said Madame Beattie briskly. "I haven't made things unpleasant. I've only waked this town out of its hundred years' sleep. You'd better be thankful to me, all of you. Trade is better, politics are most exciting, everything's different since I came." "I sent at once to Paris," said Alston, with an impartial air of conveying information they were equally interested in, "for the history of the Beattie necklace. And I've got it. I've had it a week or more, waiting to be used." He looked her full in the face to see how she took it. He would have said she turned a shade more unhealthy, in a yellow way, but not a nerve in her seemed to blench. "Well," said she, "have you come to tell me the history of the Beattie necklace?"