“Her son?” Doris ventured.

Miss Field shrugged her shoulders.

“He doesn’t drink—­he doesn’t gamble—­he doesn’t spend money—­he doesn’t run away with other people’s wives.  He’s just nothing!—­just incurably empty and idle.  He comes here very little.  His mother terrifies him.  And since he was twenty-one he has a little money of his own.  He hangs about in studios and theatres.  His mother doesn’t know any of his friends.  What she suffers—­poor Rachel!  She’d have given everything in the world for a brilliant son.  But you can’t wonder.  She’s like some strong plant that takes all the nourishment out of the ground, so that the plants near it starve.  She can’t help it.  She doesn’t mean to be a vampire!”

Doris hardly knew what to say.  Somehow she wished the vampire were not walking with Arthur!  That, however, was not a sentiment easily communicable; and she was just turning it into something else when Miss Field said—­abruptly, like someone coming to the real point—­

“Does your husband like her?”

“Why yes, of course!” stammered Doris.  “She’s been awfully kind to us about the lectures, and—­he loves arguing with her.”

“She loves arguing with him!” ’said Miss Field triumphantly.  “She lives just for such half-hours as that she gave us on the lawn after tea—­and all owing to him—­he was so inspiring, so stimulating.  Oh, you’ll see, she’ll take you up tremendously—­if you want to be taken up!”

The smiling blue eyes looked gaily into Doris’s puzzled countenance.  Evidently the speaker was much amused by the Meadowses’ situation—­more amused than her sense of politeness allowed her to explain.  Doris was conscious of a vague resentment.

“I’m afraid I don’t see what Lady Dunstable will get out of me,” she said, drily.

Miss Field raised her eyebrows.

“Are you going then to let him come here alone?  She’ll be always asking you!  Oh, you needn’t be afraid—­” and this most candid of cousins laughed aloud.  “Rachel isn’t a flirt—­except of the intellectual kind.  But she takes possession—­she sticks like a limpet.”

There was a pause.  Then Miss Field added: 

“You mustn’t think it odd that I say these things about Rachel.  I have to explain her to people.  She’s not like anybody else.”

Doris did not quite see the necessity, but she kept the reflection to herself, and Miss Field passed lightly to the other guests—­Sir Luke, a tame cat of the house, who quarrelled with Lady Dunstable once a month, vowed he would never come near her again, and always reappeared; the Dean, who in return for a general submission, was allowed to scold her occasionally for her soul’s health; the politicians whom she could not do without, who were therefore handled more gingerly than the rest; the military and naval men who loved Dunstable and put up with his wife for his sake; and the young people—­nephews and nieces and cousins—­who liked an unconventional hostess without any foolish notions of chaperonage, and always enjoyed themselves famously at Crosby Ledgers.