“What does the woman want with me?”

“That, I fear, is painfully evident.  You must have heard of the Eveleth smash a couple of months ago.  Or—­let me see!—­I think it was just when you were in New York.  No; you’d be likely not to hear of it.  The Eveleths have so carefully cut their American acquaintance for so many years that they’ve created a kind of vacuum around themselves, out of which the noise of their doings doesn’t easily penetrate.  They belong to that class of American Parisians who pose for going only into French society.”

“I know the kind.”

“Mrs. Grimston could tell you all about them, of course.  Equally at home as she is in the best French and American circles, she hears a great many things she’d rather not hear.”

“She needn’t listen to ’em.”

“Unfortunately a woman in her position, with a daughter like Marion, is obliged to listen.  But that’s rather the end of the story—­”

“And I want the beginning, Grimston, if you don’t mind.  I want to know why this Diane should be after me.”

“She’s after money,” Mr. Grimston declared, bluntly.  “She’s after money, and you’d better let me manage her.  It would save you the trouble of the refusal you’ll be obliged to make.”

“Well, tell me about her and I’ll see.”

Mr. Grimston stiffened himself in his chair and cleared his throat.

“Diane Eveleth,” he stated, with slow, significant emphasis, “is an extremely fascinating woman.  She has probably turned more men round her little finger than any other woman in Paris.”

“Is that to her credit or her discredit?”

“I don’t want to say anything against Mrs. Eveleth,” Mr. Grimston protested.  “I wish she hadn’t come near us at all.  As it is, you must be forewarned.”

“I’m not particular about that, if you’ll give me the facts.”

“That’s not so easy.  Where facts are so deucedly disagreeable, a fellow finds it hard to trot out any poor little woman in her weaknesses.  I must make it clear beforehand that I don’t want to say anything against her.”

“It’s in confidence—­privileged, as the lawyers say.  I sha’n’t think the worse of her—­that is, not much.”

“Poor Diane,” Mr. Grimston began again, sententiously, “is one of the bits of human wreckage that have drifted down to us from the pre-revolutionary days of French society.  Her grandfather, the old Comte de la Ferronaise, belonged to that order of irreconcilable royalists who persist in dashing themselves to pieces against the rising wall of democracy.  I remember him perfectly—­a handsome old fellow, who had lost an arm in the Crimea.  He used to do business with us when I was with Hargous in the rue de Provence.  Having impoverished himself in a plot in favor of the Comte de Chambord, somewhere about 1872, he came utterly to grief in raising funds for the Boulanger craze, in the train of the Duchesse d’Uzes.  He died shortly afterward, one of the last to break his heart over the hopeless Bourbon cause.”