"Oh, go on, tell me!" he begged. "You don't mean to say that my Uncle
Benton had pep enough to have a scandal in his life?"
"What do you know about your uncle?"
"Oh, I'd seen him a few times, though I'd never been up to Ashley. As
long as Grandfather was alive and the mill at Adams Center was running,
Uncle Burton used to go there to see his father, and I always used to be
hanging around Grandfather and the mill, and the woods. I was crazy
about it all, as a boy, used to work right along with the mill-hands,
and out chopping with the lumbermen. Maybe Uncle Burton noticed that."
He was struck with a sudden idea, "By George, maybe that was why he
left me the mill!" He cast his eye retrospectively on this idea and was
silent for a moment, emerging from his meditation to say, wonderingly,
"Well, it certainly is queer, how things come out, how one thing hangs
on another. It's enough to addle your brains, to try to start to follow
back all the ways things happen . . . ways you'd never thought of as of
the least importance."
"Your Uncle Burton was of some importance to us," she told him. "Miss
Oldham at the pension said that she had just met a new American, down
from Genoa, and when I heard your name I said, 'Oh, I used to know an
old Mr. Crittenden who ran a wood-working factory up in Vermont, where I
used to visit an old cousin of mine,' and that was why Miss Oldham
introduced us, that silly way, as cousins."
He said, pouncingly, "You're running on, inconsequently, just to divert
my mind from asking you again who or what Touclé is."
"You can ask and ask all you like," she defied him, laughing. "I'm not
going to tell you. I've got to have some secrets from you, to keep up
the traditions of self-respecting womanhood. And anyhow I couldn't tell
you, because she is different from everything else. You'll see for
yourself, when we get there. If she's still alive." She offered a
compromise, "I'll tell you what. If she's dead, I'll sit down and tell
you about her. If she's still alive, you'll find out. She's an Ashley
institution, Touclé is. As symbolic as the Cumean Sybil. I don't believe
she'll be dead. I don't believe she'll ever be dead."
"You've let the cat out of the bag enough so I've lost my interest in
her," he professed. "I can make a guess that she's some old woman, and I
bet you I won't see anything remarkable in her. Except that wild name.
Is it Miss Touclé, or Mrs. Touclé?"