“Don’t think, please, that I’m casting the least reflection on Anna, or showing any want of sympathy for her, when I say that I consider her partly responsible for what’s happened. Anna is ‘modern’--I believe that’s what it’s called when you read unsettling books and admire hideous pictures. Indeed,” Madame de Chantelle continued, leaning confidentially forward, “I myself have always more or less lived in that atmosphere: my son, you know, was very revolutionary. Only he didn’t, of course, apply his ideas: they were purely intellectual. That’s what dear Anna has always failed to understand. And I’m afraid she’s created the same kind of confusion in Owen’s mind--led him to mix up things you read about with things you do...You know, of course, that she sides with him in this wretched business?” Developing at length upon this theme, she finally narrowed down to the point of Darrow’s intervention. “My grandson, Mr. Darrow, calls me illogical and uncharitable because my feelings toward Miss Viner have changed since I’ve heard this news. Well! You’ve known her, it appears, for some years: Anna tells me you used to see her when she was a companion, or secretary or something, to a dreadfully vulgar Mrs. Murrett. And I ask you as a friend, I ask you as one of US, to tell me if you think a girl who has had to knock about the world in that kind of position, and at the orders of all kinds of people, is fitted to be Owen’s wife. I’m not implying anything against her! I LIKED the girl, Mr. Darrow...But what’s that got to do with it? I don’t want her to marry my grandson. If I’d been looking for a wife for Owen, I shouldn’t have applied to the Farlows to find me one. That’s what Anna won’t understand; and what you must help me to make her see.” Darrow, to this appeal, could oppose only the repeated assurance of his inability to interfere. He tried to make Madame de Chantelle see that the very position he hoped to take in the household made his intervention the more hazardous. He brought up the usual arguments, and sounded the expected note of sympathy; but Madame de Chantelle’s alarm had dispelled her habitual imprecision, and, though she had not many reasons to advance, her argument clung to its point like a frightened sharp-clawed animal. “Well, then,” she summed up, in response to his repeated assertions that he saw no way of helping her, “you can, at least, even if you won’t say a word to the others, tell me frankly and fairly--and quite between ourselves--your personal opinion of Miss Viner, since you’ve known her so much longer than we have.” He protested that, if he had known her longer, he had known her much less well, and that he had already, on this point, convinced Anna of his inability to pronounce an opinion.