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I saw you'd been through a bad time with Mrs. Murrett, and that there didn't seem to be much fun ahead for you; and I didn't see and I don't yet see the harm of trying to give you a few hours of amusement between a depressing past and a not particularly cheerful future."
He remembered her now, of course: remembered her as one of the shadowy sidling presences in the background of that awful house in Chelsea, one of the dumb appendages of the shrieking unescapable Mrs. Murrett, into whose talons he had fallen in the course of his head-long pursuit of Lady Ulrica Crispin. Oh, the taste of stale follies! How insipid it was, yet how it clung!
It was then after an interval of repose with compassionate but impecunious American friends in Paris that Miss Viner had been drawn into the turbid current of Mrs. Murrett's career. The impecunious compatriots had found Mrs. Murrett was a woman of great intellectual eminence, and the house at Chelsea "the last of the salons" Darrow knew what she meant?
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. Madame de Chantelle drew a deep sigh of intelligence. "Your opinion of Mrs. Murrett is enough! I don't suppose you pretend to conceal THAT? And heaven knows what other unspeakable people she's been mixed up with.
Murrett chucked her because Mrs. Didymus accused her of hypnotizing the Professor. But of course you don't remember. We were all invisible to you; but we could see. And we all used to wonder about you " Again Darrow felt a redness in the temples. "What about me?" "Well whether it was you or she who..." He winced, but hid his disapproval. It made the time pass to listen to her.
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.
When he and his companion, the night before, had reached the Farlows' door in the rue de la Chaise, it was only to find, after repeated assaults on its panels, that the Farlows were no longer there. They had moved away the week before, not only from their apartment but from Paris; and Miss Viner's breach with Mrs. Murrett had been too sudden to permit her letter and telegram to overtake them.
"I was with her at the theatre one night." "Why should she have asked you not to say so?" "She didn't wish it known that I'd met her." "Why shouldn't she have wished it known?" "She had quarrelled with Mrs. Murrett and come over suddenly to Paris, and she didn't want the Farlows to hear of it. I came across her by accident, and she asked me not to speak of having seen her."
She burst into a laugh that had in it all the piercing echoes of her Murrett past, and her face, at the same moment, underwent the same change, shrinking into a small malevolent white mask in which the eyes burned black. "Thank you thank you most awfully for telling me! And for all your other kind intentions! The plan's delightful really quite delightful, and I'm extremely flattered and obliged."
Murrett retold with the last amplification of detail, and when, perhaps conscious of her exhausted resources and his dwindling interest, she had committed the fatal error of saying that she could see he was unhappy, and entreating him to tell her why...
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