She looked at me humourously through her glasses.  “I’m going to pump you, you know,” she said, “it is the duty that is expected of me.  I have to talk for a countyful of women without a tongue in their heads.  So tell me about him.  Is it true that he is at the bottom of all this mischief?  Is it through him that this man committed suicide?  They say so.  He was mixed up in that Royalist plot, wasn’t he?—­and the people that have been failing all over the place are mixed up with him, aren’t they?”

“I ...  I really don’t know,” I said; “if you say so....”

“Oh, I assure you I’m sound enough,” she answered, “the Churchills—­I know you’re a friend of his—­haven’t a stauncher ally than I am, and I should only be too glad to be able to contradict.  But it’s so difficult.  I assure you I go out of my way; talk to the most outrageous people, deny the very possibility of Mr. Churchill’s being in any way implicated.  One knows that it’s impossible, but what can one do?  I have said again and again—­to people like grocers’ wives; even to the grocers, for that matter—­that Mr. Churchill is a statesman, and that if he insists that this odious man’s railway must go through, it is in the interests of the country that it should.  I tell them....”

She paused for a minute to take breath and then went on:  “I was speaking to a man of that class only this morning, rather an intelligent man and quite nice—­I was saying, ’Don’t you see, my dear Mr. Tull, that it is a question of international politics.  If the grand duke does not get the money for his railway, the grand duke will be turned out of his—­what is it—­principality?  And that would be most dangerous—­in the present condition of affairs over there, and besides....’  The man listened very respectfully, but I could see that he was not convinced.  I buckled to again....”

“‘And besides,’ I said, ’there is the question of Greenland itself.  We English must have Greenland ... sooner or later.  It touches you, even.  You have a son who’s above—­who doesn’t care for life in a country town, and you want to send him abroad—­with a little capital.  Well, Greenland is just the place for him.’  The man looked at me, and almost shook his head in my face.”

“‘If you’ll excuse me, my lady,’ he said, ’it won’t do.  Mr. Churchill is a man above hocus-pocus.  Well I know it that have had dealings with him.  But ... well, the long and the short of it is, my lady, that you can’t touch pitch and not be defiled; or, leastwise, people’ll think you’ve been defiled—­those that don’t know you.  The foreign nations are all very well, and the grand duchy—­and the getting hold of Greenland, but what touches me is this—­My neighbour Slingsby had a little money, and he gets a prospectus.  It looked very well—­very well—­and he brings it in to me.  I did not have anything to do with it, but Slingsby did.  Well, now there’s Slingsby on the rates and his wife a lady born, almost.