 CHAPTER I. THE VERY FIRST ONE. Well, I almost think it was a sallow undersized Italian with hands amok's eyes, who used to give us violin lessons, or else it was a cousin, a boy with sandy hair, who stammered and who was reading for the army. But no, I rather think it was the anxious young doctor who came when I had the measles, anyhow he, the prime evil one, is lost in the midst of antiquity. A great many people come to our house and they have always done so as long as I can recollect. Father is a royal academician and paints shocking bad portraits, but the British public is quite unaware of the fact. The British public likes to be painted by a royal academician, so it pays large prices and is hung on the line in the big room at Burlington House. They all come, red-faced, red-coated MFHs, the bejeweled wives of Manchester millionaires, young beauties, heads of colleges, the celebrities of the day. They all sit with the same fixed eyes and the same tight smile on the dais in our gorgeous studio. The studio is an imposing room. Father likes me to sit in the alcove with the golden mosaics on a peach-colored avan with turquoise blue cushions, and on show Sunday Christina is seen in a little white gown in the Oaken Gallery playing dreamy voluntaries on the organ. It looks idyllic, and nobody knows that there has usually been a family row shortly before the people begin crowding in. Christina is tart of tongue and is not to be put down by a mere parent. But I was speaking of the studio. There is a perfection of detail about the vast apartment which is impressive. Indeed, so fascinating a workshop has father fashioned for himself that I have seen a dozen people inspecting the brocades and spindle-legged tables spent forgetting to look at the pictures on the easels. The overworked critics, too, about the beginning of April are apt to gush inordinately over a nanking bowl full of daffodils while they turn their backs on a portrait that has taken the best part of a year to paint. We live in a nest of artists. Next door they paint oriental subjects and hire a dusky Arab, more or less genuine who wears a turban, and opens the front door tea parties. A dozen yards farther up the street they supply the thoroughly English idol, young ladies in white muslin sitting on September lawns, young gentlemen in riding bridges who are either accepted or rejected. Just opposite they do see pictures, the old woman shading her eyes with her hand, the young woman in despair with a careless infant at her knee, and all the houses are a red brick with gables and whitewood balconies and queer little windows in unexpected places. Our front doors are painted a pale, sea green with brass knockers and bell handles. One shows Sunday the British public wanders in and out sublimely ignorant of whether it is the house of Smith, R.A. or Robinson, A.R.A., and yet ours is the only studio with an organ. During the season we give Sunday dinner parties followed by an open evening, and we also entertain the sitters at lunch. Some of the sitters have been known to want to hear me play the violin. I play execrably, but they are too polite to say so. All this rather bores Christina whose latest hobby, socialism, takes up most of her time. Christina can be, on occasion, almost brutally cynical, but then she is clever and when I want to get out of a scrape I go to her. Mother would not be of the faintest use under such circumstances. She would get pink and flurried and tell me that she married my father at seventeen and settled down after that and would further inform me that she had no patience with such philandering. Poor mother, I really pity her limited experience. It must be like eternally dining off roast mutton to marry at seventeen and settle down dolly and respectively for the rest of your natural life. I was christened Margaret, but most people call me Peggy. It is a curious fact that all my friends call me by different names. Some call me Miss Wenman, others Margaret, while Miss Peggy and Peggy do duty more often. One young man, but he was an American, always addressed me as Peggy Wenman, a form of appellation by the by which usually prefaced a lecture. Gilbert Mandel called me Margaret. Gilbert Mandel is one of the dear departed, not that he is dead. Oh, no! I call them the dear departed when it is all over and they have butaken themselves to India or Japan or to the East End to work among the people. It is not flattering to one's vanity, but it must be frankly owned that as a rule my admirers depart with phenomenal celerity. Their devotion generally lasts from six weeks to three months. Why this thing should be I cannot tell. Some people say it is because I don't let them talk about themselves. I really think Christina objected less to Gilbert Mandel than to any of those who have come after him. If he savored slightly of the prig, she maintained he was neither a nave nor a fool. Christina doesn't care for young men. My principal objection to him was that he was associated in my imagination with drains. Of course, one cannot help the particular way in which one's parent has made a fortune, but considering his son's taste for smart society and intellectual pursuits, it was thoughtless of Mandel Pair to poke his deodorizing powder in one's eye at every turn. Poor young man, how he must have suffered. Mandel's superior pink, carbolic disinfectant powder screamed at you, so to speak, at every street corner. The legend of its multifarious virtues was writ large on every omnibus. It flared in connection with a plump lady in full-ball costume from every hoarding. Of course, there were lots of people, even when he was at Cambridge who knew nothing of the deodorizer. But it always hung like a modern sort of Damocles over poor Gilbert's head. It made him diffident where he should have been at ease. It made him malicious when it would have been to his social advantage to appear kindly. But even at Cambridge he had given unmistakable signs of being a superior person. He could repeat, to a nicety, the shibboleth of superior people. He knew when to let fall a damaging phrase about the poetical fame of Mr. Louis Morris and when to insinuate a paradox about the great and only Stendhal. In art he generally spoke of Velazquez and Degas. In music only the tetralogies of Byrote were worth discussion. Mr. Mandel was a pessimist. That was what attracted me first, for at seventeen a girl is always impressed by any cynical man of the world who will notice her. And Gilbert Mandel noticed me a good deal. He said I was suggestive, whatever that meant, and that my mind was receptive. And then he began to lend me books by Mr. Walter Pater which I remember perplexed me very much. He also sent me George Meredith's novels, and there was even a volume of Schopenhauer I remember which I used to pretend I had read. In appearance he was a middle-sized man of thirty-four with rather pink cheeks and a slightly bald forehead. His hands were fleshy and white and had exquisitely paired and polished nails. A manicure usually attended to his hands. He always had the newest scandal. And sometimes when he was going to say something specially malicious he hesitated a little in his speech not from any false shame but because he was so delighted with what he was going to say. For the rest he was always beautifully dressed and generally affected fashions which were coming in. He had two secret ambitions, to dine with the Duchess and to write an article in the contemporary review. Looking back at it now, it strikes me that Gilbert Mandel had quaint notions about amusing a young girl. He used to take us for long afternoons at the South Kensington Museum where we gazed at Persian tiles and Japanese ivories and illuminated missiles until my eyes ached and Christina roundly declared she wouldn't stay another minute. Then Gilbert would look at us from under his duping eyelids with a surprised little stare. She was never tired of art and how Christina was bored. She came from a stern sense of duty and because as she frankly said the thing wouldn't do. Poor Christina, she was destined to see many such as Mr. Gilbert Mandel come and go. Other days it would be the National Gallery. He never went inside modern exhibitions of pictures in London where I learned a good deal about Velazquez and Holbein and Franz Hall's. It is from that period that my suspicion dates that father does not know how to paint pictures. He came to our house a good deal. Father laughed at his clothes and his manners but said he was a sharp fellow. While mother was amused with his little stories about smart society into which by great aciduity he had managed to effect a sort of entrance. In Mayfair they knew nothing of the deodorizer. While senior lived in a mansion in Surrey where he cultivated orchids and pineapples and the world knew nothing of him. The son on the other hand had charming rooms in St. James where he gave frequent tea parties which were sparsely attended by a handful of modish women interlarded with thin, youngish old men who spent their lives criticizing the critics and whose claim to immortality lay in a memoir of Lamb or Coleridge. Somehow or other these parties were not hilarious. The elements did not mix and Mr. Mandel was a somewhat flurried, nervous host. The day that an ambassador came to tea his distraction was almost painful. Gilbert Mandel was an example of that extremely modern mixture, a man of fashion and a critic. Indeed his respect for smart women was only equaled by his adoration for the log rollers of the Saturday Review. I have never made out to this day why he noticed me. Christina says he must have had a depraved taste for schoolgirls, or else he thought by taking the raw material of a woman so to speak he might fashion a companion to his taste. He tried hard to cultivate my mind. He was always writing to me. That was another odd thing about Gilbert Mandel. An ordinary young man looks upon pens and paper with deep-rooted suspicion and distrust. I have had more than one flirtation carried on solely by Telegram. But Mr. Mandel was always writing me long epistles, very carefully worded and in a semi-literary style. I remember I was very proud of those letters. They flattered me in a young girl's most vulnerable point. They implied that my opinion was worth having. I don't know whether it was that or his pronounced pessimism which attracted me most. He was also fond of implying, as he pointed out with a white hand, some masterpiece of the Florentine school, or sat murmuring paradoxes over the tea-table, that there were places and things which we should see in the future together. There is a little town in Italy, Orvieto, he said one afternoon when Christina and I had been listening to a disquisition on the Renaissance, where I must take you one day, Margarit. You must see the façade of the cathedral. Orvieto is an education in art. It long remained vague, but one day it was a very wet day, I remember, and we were coming back in a handsome from the National Gallery. He alluded in a roundabout sort of way to an organ he was pleased to call his heart. Then it struck me all at once that it was impossible. It was not the deodorizer that I minded. I think it was the pinkness of his nails and a certain complacent way which he had of regarding me, which irritated me when it came to a question of a life-long interview. I suppose I must have said no, and possibly with some fervour. Smiling vaguely he took my hand. He evidently did not believe me. I won't hurry you, dear child, he said as he left me on my doorstep. You will think it over. You will be able to make up your mind by and by. But I never made up my mind that I wanted to marry Mr. Mandel. Not long after he came to say that he was going abroad. At first he wrote pretty often, and as usual his letters were semi-literary, though to be sure the burning question was discussed from various points of view. But to my relief the letters got more and more literary as time went on, and finally they stopped all together. End of chapter one. Chapter two of My Flirtations by Ella Hepworth-Dixon. This, Librevox Recording, is in the public domain. Two. Perhaps it was by way of contrast to the superior person that I appreciated Tony Lambert so much, for a time. He was the most naive individual I have ever known. Indeed, his naivety quite disarmed me, and in a breezy boyish way he was diverting. To be sure he did not expect me to reach Schopenhauer, of whose existence I imagine he was but dimly aware, nor did he ask me to spend afternoons at the National Gallery. Kempton Park and the Gayety Theatre were more to his taste, and while this sport of affair lasted, the house had a rollicking youthful atmosphere which was the result of something more subtle than Tony's ringing laugh and Tony's skirmishing fox terriers, who invariably accompanied their master in his many visits. We neither of us took each other seriously, and that added a certain charm to the thing. Everybody at home liked Tony except, I think, Christina, who said she couldn't understand his slang and that he made a draft in the drawing room he was so boisterous and dressless. The family saw a good deal of him in those days, for he was being painted in parade dress, and he used to stay to lunch so as to be able to pose again in the afternoon. I remember the first time he came in with father, pink with mortification at being seen in his uniform in the daytime out of barracks. Since comes, I wonder, the love of Mufti so deeply implanted in the rest of the British officer. Tony fortunately learned to forget his early sense of discomforture and spent many merry half-hours in our little study when he had done sitting, singing soldier songs with a fearful and wonderful accompaniment of his own invention, while the dogs chased each other barking joyously over the sofas and chairs. How he used to light up the dim little twilight room with discarded bravery in his irrepressible spirits. Mr. Anthony Lambert was the eldest son of Norfolk people. One day or other he would come into possession of a fine old house, some excellent shooting and three thousand a year, an income by no means large enough to keep up the towers. Therefore it was an understood thing, especially by Lady Marion, his mama, that Tony when he married was to marry money. In the meantime Tony was to be painted first to adorn the next exhibition at Burlington House and afterwards the collection of family portraits at the towers. So that in this way the boy, in spite of Lady Marion's precautions, came directly under the influence of a most undesirable young person to it, myself. Tony was a lieutenant in a line regiment and I fear his high spirits made him have occasional differences of opinion with his colonel. In appearance he was distinctly good to look at. He had a clean pink skin, twinkling blue eyes and hair so flaxen that it was almost silver. His shoulders were broad and square. He had a delightful laugh and he was just three and twenty. And without being in the least conceited Tony was thoroughly pleased with himself, his regiment and his belongings. He had in a supreme degree the magnetism which comes of perfect health, good spirits and complete self-satisfaction. Not an infectious thing is happiness and what a golden age is three and twenty. With what vigor did Tony play long tennis, how excited he got over races and cricket matches, how hot he became when he danced, what pretentious suppers he could eat. The very sound of his voice in the hall, a voice with raised inflections for the ends of Tony's sentences always finished joyously, roused one up on the foggiest and dreariest of days. To go for a walk in the park or along Piccadilly with Tony Lambert was a whole education in itself in the ways of young men. His joy was so manifest when a pretty face, a showy figure or even a well-cut gown appeared in sight. He had the omnivorous glance which takes in every detail and which is the prerogative of men who spend most of their leisure in sport. seldom will you find a writer, a lawyer or a scientist with the faculty of observation as highly cultivated as in the most brainless individual used to the rod and the gun. Tony by the by was one of the young men with whom I corresponded by electric telegraph. As a matter of fact I do not possess a scrap of his handwriting. Whether he was doubtful of his prowess in grammar and spelling or whether it was a bit of worldly wisdom beyond his ears will remain forever a mystery, but Christina got quite tired of those agitated pulls of the bell which announced the telegraph boy while at this period orange-cuttered envelopes were served up to me at every hour of the day. There was nothing he didn't offer us, from invitations to military balls to bags of American candy. To me especially he offered a great many photographs of himself in various degrees of military splendor which gave my room for the time being quite a spirited and martial air. Of course this didn't last long, for my photograph frames and space to put them are limited whereas my friends are many and in the course of years one frame contains many counterfeit presentments. Christina says that if I have a heart it must be like my photograph frames. From what I could gather Mr. Lambert was never in love with fewer than three ladies at a time. He was like one of the modern monster shopkeepers, a sort of universal admirer of the fairer sex. And yet one never blamed him for it, perhaps because he was so perfectly candid in his enthousiasms. As far as I could make out, the fair with whom I shared his affections at this time were his major's wife, a person with fluffy hair, an exaggerated figure, and a well-worn smile, and an individual whose acquaintance had appeared he had not yet succeeded in making, but who occupied a distinguished position in the second row of the gate he chorused. It was always amusing to get Tony on to the subject of his loves. The little friends that he, played with, seemed to have been of all ages and sizes, and his amorous difficulties appeared to have been numerous. Once already had his family offered a substantial sum to a young lady in the Camberwell Road as a substitute for Tony's hand. But that, as he acknowledged with a pink and rueful countenance, had been in his gay and giddy youth. Having now arrived at the discreet age of three and twenty, he was resolved to mend his ways. And to begin well he proceeded in his airy and irresponsible way to imagine that he cared about me. I wonder what Lady Marion would have said of the three months that followed. Tony took his long leave on January 1st, and it was at this time being a good deal in London that he sat for his portrait. For the next two months Christina and I were never sure when he would not burst into Ardenne with his joyous laugh and a couple of excited dogs wagging delighted tails with some project of rushing us off somewhere or other in search of amusement. What would Lady Marion have said to all this, I wonder? And of those many accidental meetings in Bond Street when we used to drop in at the minor exhibitions and come out sublimely unconscious of whether we had been looking at Van Beers or Gustave Dauret, or of the pompous dances in Queen's Gate to which Mother allowed me to take the boy and where he met, I believe for the first time in his life, the youth and loveliness of South Kensington. Tony had met county girls and garrison girls and gaiety girls, but I don't think he had ever before danced with a London middle-class damsel. Lady Marion I verily believe would have preferred the young person in the Camberwell Road. But our last dance was not to be in Queen's Gate. The regiment was ordered to the Courroix and Tony was in despair. Nothing would do but we must come to the regiment's farewell ball at Mulchester and it was there in the long, low rooms of the officer's mess against a background of flags and military trophies that I saw Tony's blonde head for the last time. The pretty scene comes back to me now, the glare of scarlet coats among the flesh tones of the women, the delicate tinted tulle dresses against a bank of pink azaleas and palms, the blue uniforms of the gunners and the green of the rifles striking a somber note in the gay cord of color, the intimate sadness of those valsary franes which the band of the regiment played, and over all that acute atmosphere of mixed pain and pleasure which is associated, when one is 18, with the words, for the last time. It was my first soldier's ball. How well I remember the whole atmosphere of that night! The colonel, smiling, urbane and slightly indifferent, the colonel's wife, a lady with protruding teeth and neatly parted hair who was said to be wealthy, the eager young faces of the junior subalterns as they surrounded some showy beauty, the heavy jawed captain to whom I was introduced on my entry and who deserted me at once for a buck some lady with dubious hair and many diamonds. Oh, those military ladies! How dashing! How much too dashing they were! What drawn in wastes! What liberal smiles! What suspiciously white shoulders! How pert and offhand they seemed in public and how confiding they looked in obscure corners downback passages where Tony's straw-colored hair and scarlet coat were to be seen often during that night. Heaven has not been pleased to inflict on me a suspicious disposition, or I fear I should have fast but an indifferently amusing evening. For Mr. Anthony Lambert, with the gay insouciance of youth, had thoughtlessly invited some half dozen of his loves and his major's wife it appeared was inordinately jealous. Some 15 years ago this lady had been described in a local newspaper as a magnificent blonde and she had been living up to the epithet ever since. She had all the heirs of a beauty and she seemed to regard Mr. Lambert as her a special property. At ten o'clock I heard her reproaching him for only wanting three dances. At one o'clock she deliberately fetched him out of a balcony where he was saying goodbye to a pretty little girl with red hair. I don't wonder that Tony looked harassed. The smile of his major's wife was terrifying. Poor boy! I at least had never worried or reproached him and I think he was proportionately grateful at the last. It was a black night and pouring rain I remember when we finally drove away but I could see that Tony's blue eyes looked unspeakable things as we whispered a final hurried goodbye at the carriage door. One morning a few months later we read in the paper that a marriage had been arranged and would take place immediately between Mr. Anthony Lambert of the Blankshire Regiment, eldest son of Mr. and Lady Marion Lambert of the Towers, sleeping to Norfolk, and Catherine, eldest daughter of Patrick O'Flaherty Asquire of Dublin. He had been taken seriously by a garrison beauty a dozen years older than himself. Although they have already three children, I hear that Lady Marion refuses to see her enterprising Irish daughter in law and now the regiment is in India. Poor Tony! He was born it would appear to be the sport of the less amiable members of our sex. His major's wife is of course with the regiment and the people say that Mrs. Anthony Lambert is primitively jealous. A ridiculous song that he used to strum always occurs to me when I think of him for the refrain Woman Lovely Woman epitomizes the tragic comedy of his blameless little life. End of Chapter 2 Chapter 3 of My Flirtations by Ella Hepworth-Dixon This LibriVox recording is in the public domain. 3. It is with an uneasy conscience that I recall the brief episode of Mr. Hanbury Price. There used to be a derisive ring in Christina's voice when she alluded to Mr. Price as my new young man. She knew well enough that he could not by the wildest stretch of imagination be called young. Neither to be sure was he in the seer and yellow leaf. No, he was worse than old. He was middle-aged. Middle-aged in ideas rather than in person for he affected a jauntiness of attire which he was able to carry off to a certain extent being rather big with high color and having hair still untouched with gray. He also liked to be thought what in early Victorian novels would have been called an agreeable rattle. But then half of Mr. Price's conversation consisted of projects and invitations which somehow never came off. It was wonderful what a reputation for festive hospitality Mr. Price had, among people who didn't know him well. One of his least agreeable idiosyncrasies was his curious distrust of everybody. He was always in dread of being as he would have expressed it, done. So suspicious indeed was he that he even suspected himself. His coup on the stock exchange, the bouquet he had offered overnight, the very wine he drank, suggested the afterthought that he had made a fool of himself. That it was possible he might not yet get the desired return for his money. His small red-litted eyes of a watery blue continually betrayed this recurring idea, while his loosely hung jaw and mouth gave signs of a loquacious temperament which his frequent and abrupt laugh did not succeed in making genial. Though he did not mention it in polite society, Mr. Hanbury Price hailed from Tulse Hill. In that eminently respectable suburb he at first seen the light, and in the same stucco mansion there still resided his mother and a bevy of plain unmarried sisters to whom he used to journey down to partake of early dinner on Sundays. Never mentioned Tulse Hill to smart people, he confided to me one day with one of his sudden and unmerthful laughs. If I do they want to know if it's in Yorkshire. He was curiously anxious to be voted popular, at least among the right sort of people, and was fond of alluding in an airy way to the parties he had given or intended to give. But as he had an inherent dislike to laying out half a crown on anything which was not strictly necessary, Mr. Price must have undergone untold tortures, if indeed these festivities ever really came off in his efforts to be classed among the bachelors who entertain. Of course it was only in time that I became aware of all these amiable little peculiarities, for at first sight Mr. Price gave one the impression of being a good-natured, talkative and gregarious member of society, with an inclination for giving little dinners and theatre parties. We met him first on a Saturday to Monday on the river at the house of a vulgar little woman whose portrait father was painting. Mrs. Bodley Gallard was loud in his praises. She had it transpired, only known Mr. Hanbury Price of Fortnight. Our hostess was one of those over-efficient people who say things that make one's blood run cold. Now, my dear Miss Winman, she whispered to me on Sunday night after dinner. Please be nice to the poor young man. Mrs. Bodley Gallard belonged to the class of person who caused everybody a young man who is still unmarried, even though he be on the wrong side of fifty. I assure you he is devoted, quite devoted. Now promise me you'll think about it. A speech which had the effect of making me extremely rude to Mr. Price when he joined me after dinner, and it was only when he had seen us into our cab at Paddington Station next morning that I mentioned, after he had made repeated inquiries on the subject that we were generally at home at five o'clock. He was not long in coming, and when he appeared he was profuse in his invitations. Would we do a theatre? Would we dine with him? He was thinking of taking a house on the river for August. He hoped that mother would bring us down to stay with him. The least we could do was to accept his offer for the play. We were to dine somewhere first, and the party was arranged for the following Tuesday. But when Tuesday arrived there was a postcard for Mr. Price to say that the proposed festivity was postponed, and as I afterwards found out, because he had been vainly soliciting free admissions for the Ithalaya Theatre from a young man whom he knew who played the footman in the first piece. Then when the night at last arrived we found we were to partake of a three-and-six-penny-tablet-dote dinner with a maddening accompaniment of gleece, and this from a man who talked continually of the Amphitrion and the Bachelor's Club. That damped my spirits to begin with. Of course, when one is under twenty one does not care much for the niceties of cooking and the brand of the champagne, but it is lowering to one's dignity in the eyes of one's family to be asked to dine a tablet-dote with travelling Yankees in gaping provincials. But it was nothing to what followed. We were a party of five, mother and I and a couple of men beside our host. When we were at last landed inside the doors of the Thalaya, we found that Mr. Hanbury Price had secured seats for his party in the fourth row of the dress circle. The two other men exchanged amused in surprised glances. Mother and I declared we much preferred the dress circle to a box or stalls. And Mr. Price, who began to dimly discern that for once his economy was ill-timed, spent half his evening in the lobby having as I shrewdly suspect a prolonged altercation with the attendant on the subject of a charge of six pence for each program. It grieves me to think what we must have cost Mr. Hanbury Price and handsoms for our house as he more than once explained is inconveniently situated from omnibuses. Whether he really imagined himself to be in love I have never been able to decide, but he was obviously haunted by dreadful forebodings as to the expense of a young lady with my tastes and proclivities. He used to lecture me about taking care of my gowns and suggested that I was recklessly extravagant in the matter of feather boas and shoes. One day he tried to persuade me to attend the cookery classes at South Kensington, and another evening when he was unusually sentimental he asked me if I didn't like the neighborhood of Notting Hill. All this contributed to Christina's joy for Mr. Price's struggles between economy and the tender passion were really diverting to behold. I think perhaps when I look back at the whole affair dispassionately that it was the box of chocolates that ended Mr. Hanbury Price's dream. One afternoon when we had been particularly confidential he asked me at parting if I cared for sweets. The next day there arrived from the civil service stores a small cardboard box of second rate chocolate creams addressed to me, to me, who had had qualms of conscience that he might have telegraphed to Paris for some elaborate offering from the boulevard des Italiens. Telegraphed indeed, Hanbury Price was not the man to waste his money in telegrams when a letter or, better still, a half penny postcard would answer the same purpose. I have quite a collection of postcards in his handwriting, for he wrote often on every sort of matter, and he chiefly used the cheapest means of communication. There is the mass of postcards, for instance, which relates to the famous dinner at the Crystal Palace, which finally ended the affair. We tried hard to get out of it, Christina and I, but it was of no avail, and in the end we had to go. His bodily galler to us to be the chaperone and there were to be one or two other men. I like to go over the events of that day, for they are unique in my history. Five o'clock was the hour of meeting at Victoria Station. It was high mid-summer and bitterly cold and damp. Arrived at the station we found that Mr. Price had already taken second class tickets for the whole party, but that he was not above recouping himself from our purses for this outlay. Just as Jolly's second class declared our host, if you're a party don't you know, though he laughed awkwardly when he found that a couple of damp, plush-clad babies with their respective mamas were also to journey down with us to Sydenham. Of course we arrived too early and wandered about on the interminable and dubious boards of the palace among pieces of greasy paper, the remnants of recent feasts, until seven o'clock. But dinner came at last, with a lengthy harangue as to which table Mr. Price had selected, an interview with the manager, and some sour sotern cup. Only one young man had turned up, the other two had probably dined with Mr. Price before, and he chaffed our host into ordering a beverage more suitable to the damp night. But even that failed to revive the flagging spirits of the party. Mournful pauses fell, and Hanbury Price's eye traveled anxiously after the champagne bottle as it went its way round the table. Then Mrs. Bodley-Gallard could not pretend that she was enjoying herself. And then, with the phenomenally hard peaches and dried figs, came the final blow. There were to be fireworks, but our host had evidently no intention of offering us covered seats from which to view them. One of you young ladies will come with me in the grounds, urged the ever-economical Hanbury, casting a sentimental and meaning glance in my direction. I'm afraid I've caught cold already, I said with decision. And then Christina, with true nobility, came to my rescue an answer to my appealing nudge. I will, if you like, she said quickly, Peggy can't wander about in the dark in the cold tonight. She's nearly got bronchitis as it is. The child must stay indoors. The only young man at once secured seats for the chaperone and myself, and Mr. Hanbury Price spent what he may have intended to be the eventful night of his life, wandering about the grounds under a dripping umbrella with my sister. Christina's account of the evening is extremely diverting. I shall always be grateful to her for that night. Whatever differences may arise between us in after years, I shall never forget from what an awkward interview Christina saved me. And he, for his part, had a chastened air in the railway carriage coming home. We left town very soon after, and when I meet Mr. Hanbury Price on rare occasions in the park or at some crowded party, I get ready my sweetest and most deceitful smile. But Mr. Hanbury Price invariably looks the other way. End of Chapter 3. Chapter 4 of My Flirtations by Ella Hepworth Dixon. This LibriVox recording is in the public domain. The gleam of velvety grass through a gray cloister, a bare oaken staircase leading to a low room lined with books, a cushioned window seat, a summer night, and the distant sound of someone playing the violin. These are the things that come back to me whenever anyone pronounces the name of Frank Harding. It was at Oxford at commemoration that I saw him first. He was lying on his back on the grass in one of those small meager gardens in the parks which make the joy of Oxford dawns and their wives and their troops of babies. As a matter of fact he was being photographed, we were all being photographed, as is the pleasing custom during commemoration week. We had gone to pay a call on the Talford Browns. Talford Brown is the most eminent authority on the Phoenician language in Oxford, and we had been at once taken into the garden where tea and the photographer's camera awaited us. There we found the usual Oxford group. The lady with smooth hair and clinging gown, one or two vague bearded fellows or tutors, the girl in a paced knee and badly made boots, a couple of small boys, two babies, three dogs, and Frank. Flat on his back, as I said before, his six-foot-one-of-length arrayed in virgin flannels and a Trinity College blazer. Frank Harding was one of those exceptional beings, an undergraduate on easy, nay, even familiar terms with dons. The wives of these gentlemen were very tolerant of Frank. Indeed, if it were given to a don's wife to be capable of a flirtation, I am pretty sure they would have flirted with him. As it was he strolled in and out of those villas in Norum Gardens very much as he liked, played with the babies, teased the dogs, and helped the ladies of the house in their perennial little difficulties with the Greek syntax. In spite of his eccentricities and those daring caricatures of the dons of his which regularly appeared in Shrimpton's window, the authorities all liked Frank and everybody was ready to bet if one can picture such a transaction taking place in a college common room that Frank would take a first. We stayed to dinner at the Talford Browns and we were much struck with the somewhat affected simplicity of the Oxford interior. There was a long table, sparsely decorated with attenuated glass flower-holders, in each of which were placed three Iceland poppies. Mrs. Talford Brown, who had the reputation of being a witt, and was understood to say scathing things about the undergraduates, herself carved the cold mutton which formed the principal dish at dinner. Professor Talford Brown drank toast and water. We had a salad, with a trifle too much vinegar, and we talked a good deal of the higher education of women and of the recent finals for honours which had just come off. Christina sat next to the professor and I could see that our host and hostess were as much taken with her as it is possible for Oxford people to be with a mere Londoner. And this was an inexpressible relief to me. For every minute I felt that I was falling lower in their regard. An irresistible impulse seized me to say frivolous things, to giggle in an imbecile manner, and to ask Mrs. Talford Brown if she had ever been to the empire. Do what I may in the after-years. I know that I shall ever be regarded with contempt in those Oxford circles in which plain living and high thinking obtain. But Frank Harding, who sat next to me by no means shared this opinion. To begin with, we recollected that we were, so to speak, old friends. We remembered that it had taken two nurses and a governess to make peace between us some fifteen years ago when we had met at a children's party and found no favour in each other's eyes. The Hardings, indeed, were connections of my mothers, so that we had seen Frank now and then up to the trying age of eight, but after that they had gone to live in the country and we had lost sight of them for years. But on the strength of my having pulled his hair some dozen years ago, Frank, in his unconventional and airy way, insisted on calling us Christina and Peggy. After dinner Mrs. Talford Brown went up to put the twins to bed. Nothing was ever allowed to interfere with this domestic right. And then we all sat in the ugly little square garden and watched a great yellow moon travel slowly up the sky. And Frank Harding talked. He was as far removed from the ordinary football-playing young man as it is possible to be. To begin with, his father was a poet, one of our finest latter-day lyricists, and it was from him that he inherited all his sympathy, his feminine intuitions, and his charmingly impracticable theories. At present, of course, he was only a clever, somewhat lanky boy, but his beautiful gray eyes made him almost handsome and his perfectly easy manners were curiously attractive. He had the wildest ideas and was the sort of man who might found a new religion, commit a murder, devote a lifetime to the East End, or take away his neighbor's wife and write a book to prove that his action was justified. Some years have passed since then, but I shall never be astonished to hear anything of Frank Harding except that he had gone into the city and was paying taxes in bays water. We saw a great deal of Frank in the days that followed. To enjoy commemoration, one must be twenty and never have stayed in Oxford before. It was astonishing how much we managed to get into that week and how much of Frank's society we had. There were lazy mornings, punting on the chair well, and picnics to Godstow and Sanford Lasher, the ball at Christ Church, and the garden parties in the colleges, for which we put on our best frocks and stare to the celebrities and then hurried home to a cozy tea in our rooms where a dozen undergraduates fought decorously for the honour of handing the tea cups. And then the endless strawberries, the valsas that work quarreled for, the unstinted devotion of the boys. I am old-fashioned enough to like a young man to be in love. Even if his fashion burns for someone else, one likes to see it, and it is still more interesting when the young man expents his ardour on oneself. So Frank fell in love with me, and I liked it. I remember it all as if it were yesterday. There is the sad-coloured June Day, a harmony in soft grays and greens, when we want to pick fritillaries in Mesopotamia. It was the day after commemoration was over, and the narrow willow-frenched river was deserted. A far off we could see the grey spires and towers of the university against the wide, white sky, while across the fat buttercup gilded meadows came the mellow, distant sound of Oxford bells. As Frank pushed the punt lazily upstream, we seemed wrapped in a mysterious green silence. We left the punt where the old-chain fairy crosses the chairwell, and plunged into the long new grass. I carried a basket for the fritillaries, and Frank had brought an empty soda-water bottle, a proceeding which puzzled me immensely, until I found that all among the abundant grass studded with June flowers there leapt and danced hundreds of tiny, nimble, gay-hearted frogs, only lately emerged from the juvenile or tadpole state. They are so like undergraduates, I cried, kneeling in the long grass and stretching to predatory fingers here and there, while Frank pretended to be offended and declared I shouldn't put any of my frogs into his soda-water bottle. But in the end we compromised, and Frank was set to gather the queer, spotted, purplish-brown fritillaries, whilst I crammed the leaping little reptiles into our bottle. And so the June afternoon slipped by, until the clang of evening bells warned us it was time to turn homewards. The next morning, when the train which conveyed us back to town steamed out of the station, the two things I carried away with me as a remembrance of my first commemoration were a lap full of La France roses and the sight of a pair of wistful gray eyes. Frank had got permission to stay in Oxford during a part of the vacation and work, but his work took a form which would have scarcely met with the entire approval of his tutor, seeing that he was reading for a first in classics. One night a few days after, as Christina and I were dressing for an evening party, I was handed a letter in a strange handwriting. It contained a poem, and the poem was about myself. After Tony's telegrams and Hanbury Price's postcards, it seemed I dillig'd to have a charming, clever young man writing poems about me. I waved the missive triumphantly under Christina's nose and made myself, as she remarked, odious for the rest of the evening. He says I am like the morning star shining above the mist of a murky city, in that the birds sing sweeter at my footfall and skim like hope across life's. Life's fiddle-stick, said Christina, past those hot tongs. How can you encourage boys to write you such rubbish I can't conceive? You're an hour late as it is. Get on your cloak, Peggy, and for heaven's sake throw that dribble into the fire. But I naturally did nothing of the kind, and when Frank appeared at our house a week later, somewhat sad of me and looking rather thin, I did my best to cheer him up, though we neither of us said a word about the poem. He stayed until it was time to catch the last train to Oxford, and after that he was always appearing at unexpected moments. He used to write me odd little abrupt notes asking if I cared to see him. What could I say? It is awkward to tell people that you don't wish to see them. Besides, besides, I did want to. It was only when it came to the stern realities of life that I took Christina's point of view and saw what an impossible thing it was. I remember so well the day it was finally decided, a cold, drizzling November afternoon. He had rushed up from the country where he was living now that he had left Oxford and had been shown into the long amber and white drawing room where they had forgotten to light a fire so that the cold winter twilight wrapped us round as we sat. Frank had taken a first and there was some idea of his getting a fellowship. But he did not wish to stop in Oxford or indeed in England. The Imperial destinies of the English race was one of his hobbies, and he asked me to give up London and go to north-western Canada where he wanted to start a new community. Friends of Margaret Fuller and the Blythe Dale romance of Laurence Aliphont and his self-sacrificing bride were evoked to tempt me. But I knew, I still had sense enough to know, that it was not for me. The dreary November day had closed in before Frank rose to go. And long after he had gone I sat on in the cold dark room. One by one the lamps twinkled out all up the street and a dreary piano organ came and played some thread-bear ears from a comic opera. Christina was very nice to me when she found me sitting alone in the cold and the dark, for I think she knew I had been crying. Frank Harding has always refused to see me since that day. He writes sometimes, the last time I heard from him he was in South Africa, and I gathered from his letter that he considered the amalgamation by marriage of the Bohr race the duty of all English settlers in the Transfell. There are times, times when I am a little tired of the egotism and peorial frivolity of London young men, tired of their little quarrels and their little admirations for fashionable divinities, when I would give worlds to see Frank stretched in my deck chair, his grey eyes gazing into futurity, and propounding even the most amazing of his curious social schemes. And he, does he ever think of those old oxford days, days full of cool green shadows and quick with emotion, over yonder in his home under a torrid sky? Probably not. Probably not. There are no fields of amaranth on this side of the grave, some poet has wisely written. There is no name with whatever emphasis of passionate love repeated, of which the echo is not faint at last. End of Chapter 4 Chapter 5 of My Flirtations by Ella Hepworth-Dixon This LibriVox recording is in the public domain. He was curiously pretty, incredibly malicious and indisputably smart, with a nice house in Sloan Street where he entertained a great deal and a little following of young gentlemen who copied his neckties and buttonholes and whom one sometimes saw giggling together in corners and calling each other by pet names. When one of them wanted to give Val Redmond a birthday present, in that set the young men constantly make each other little presents, he chose a silver vinaigrette which Val took out with him to dinner all that season. And yet the boy was very far from being a fool. If he had lived in less degenerate days and had been obliged to work for his living he might have made a name for himself. But as it was he only gave amusing parties, while one was haunted by misgivings if one had to leave his drawing room early with one's reputation behind. When he gave dinners and Sunday lunches at his house in Sloan Street his aunt, Lady Marchman, presided. Too bad only men's parties would not have suited Val. He liked the society of women and particularly of old women. But then his elderly female friends were invariably clever and some had had, in addition, an almost historical past. Dear Julia Calverly, he would say of the Dowager Countess, he had the most astounding way of talking of his elderly dames. I love that woman. It is as good as reading a scandalous memoir pour Sylvia to talk to her. Julia is very fainter, siegler, admitted a pasty-looking youth of nineteen. Oh, my dear, end of the last century you mean, smirked Val. One of the most amusing things about Mr. Valentine Redmond was his imperturbable coolness. Though hardly two and twenty he had none of the tremors, the diffidences of youth. I have seen him talk to an archbishop or a foreign potentate with the same ease with which he would tackle an undergraduate or take a young lady down to supper. Not that you would ever have caught Val Redmond wasting his assiduous sweetness on a young girl. Women under thirty seldom went to his house. One of his least pleasing characteristics was a tendency to flout and pout. He was constantly having little quarrels with his intimate friends. His intimate friendships lasted on average exactly six weeks. In other houses where they talk scandal it is usually about acquaintances, but in Val's drawing room you generally heard his bosom friends deprived of their reputations. This is a trait which makes society feel uneasy, and to it one may perhaps attribute the brief duration of Val's friendships. Hours for instance, though it was never perforated, lasted but a brief two months. The Duchess of Birmingham brought him to our house. She was going to have her portrait painted and Val was brought along to help to decide on her costume. He knew a great deal about clothes. His taste was charming. His house as pretty as a house need be. Her grace was a stout little person from Philadelphia who was at vast pains to acquire an English manner. Her chief desire, as far as I could make out, was to be painted in a coronet. But Mr. Redmond, with his head on one side and his eyes half shut, tabooed the idea of a diadem. He was rather in favour of sables of dark velvet's of heavy brocades. Father, I remember, was furious when he had gone. Does the young puppy think he knows more about it than I do? Conn found his impudence. Why, I have been painting portraits for twenty years. And yet, after all, it was Valentine's costume which was chosen, and the Duchess brought him again more than once to see the picture as it progressed. Father always liked to have me in the studio when he was painting, so that every time he appeared we made a little more of each other's acquaintance. I think I was rather rude to him than otherwise, but he was the sort of person who disliked Gush in women. Gushing was too much the prerogative of his boys, who usually by the by were heard addressing each other as my dear. Sitting on the oaken staircase of the studio talking to Val while the Duchess's portrait went on below, I learned a number of surprising things about London society. He told me of all the houses where a young man might permit himself to be seen, where it would be to his advantage to do so, and where it would be fatal, absolutely fatal for him to appear. I had the imprudence to lunch with the Patterson-Taylor's, those new people in Prince's Gate, and though, of course, a lunch doesn't count the same as a dinner, I assure you it was weeks before I heard the last of it. A young man can't be too careful where he goes, Val confided to me one day with a rueful air. He had found me filling the bowls and vases with roses and had insisted on being allowed to help. It was one of his talents, that of arranging flowers. He was sitting on the hall table, swinging his feet and holding his head on one side as he twitched an amethyst-coloured orchid in front of the light. There is the question of dancing, too. Oh, not that! Screamed Mr. Redman in his rather shrill voice as he plucked a huge poppy out of my hand. You can't possibly put that in blue and white. Even Keen is only for roses. What was I saying? Oh, yes, about balls. Isn't it absurd of people to expect one to dance everywhere? Some of us were at Mrs. Vandalar's ball the other night, you know the woman I mean, with a quantity of drab daughters, and as she actually had the effrontery to seize me by the elbow and ask me why I wasn't dancing the polka? As if anyone ever did anything but sup at the Vandalar's. As if she didn't know perfectly well that one only dances at the houses where one dines. I resisted for a long time, and then she had the shocking taste to remind me that she had seen me leading the coutillion at the duchesses with Lady Susan when she knows that Lady Susan is one of the most amusing persons in London. She is the faintest siecle old maid. I shall never forget our first dinner at his house in Sloan Street. It was the oddest party. There was something strange and unusual not only about the guests, but the varied dishes and the flowers. The dining room, painted and decorated like that of a Roman villa, contained nothing but the table and one or two giant palms and pots of old faience. The tablecloth was nearly covered with a mass of pink rose leaves, with here and there a spray of roses thrown carelessly on to this pink carpet. A huge lamp of oriental workmanship hung by gold chains lighted up the mass of rose-cutter and there were none of the usual fripperies of a lady's table. But perhaps what struck one most on glancing round the room was the fact that all the men were boys, though they appeared prematurely old and that all the ladies were elderly, though they, to be sure, looked unnaturally young. The glories of the past, simpered the pale, clean-shaven youth who had taken me in surveying the ladies with unabashed effrontery. It reminds me of the ruins of the Acropolis, don't you know? My neighbor got very confidential as the dinner progressed. He gazed at me critically with tired eyes and her lids which drooped a little at the corners. Do you know our host well? No. The pity he's so shockingly malicious. Gives charming dinners, as far as the people go, but I don't think much of his cook, do you? Oh, no, I've only known him a fortnight. He insisted on being introduced to me at the Vandalur's ball, and I thought as he is a great friend of one of my dearest friends, Tommy Singleton, you know, that he would be sure to be nice, and I really do think he's charming. He would take no denial. I've dined here already three times. We go everywhere together. Do you see that weird old person opposite? She says quite two deliciously amusing things. She is a great friend of the Prince of Waleses. Tommy Singleton seems in great form tonight. He is so very charming. I must introduce you to him, though I'm afraid, my dear Miss Winman, that you won't get on very well. Tommy is so dreadfully frightened of debutants. Don't you think, dear Lady Rujmo's new toupee is quite delicious? I do. But then I adore the meretricious and the artificial. That is Miss Van Hoyt, the American heiress. She always wears that miniature of an old gentleman with a hooked nose and powdered hair. She says it's her grandfather. But Tommy Singleton declares, and he had it from the Duchess, that Miss Van Hoyt's grandfather kept a small cheese-monger shop in Ninth Avenue. How quite too weird a lady Susan looks. But then she always has her gowns made from remnants bought at the summer sales. She must have said something dreadful and proper to Val. He is laughing so. Look, he has got quite pink. I wonder what it is. I shall ask her directly. She loves to have the whole table listened to her stories, though really her stories are d'un red. Lady Susan, you know, is not afraid of le moquis choc. And of a truth, the ladies at Mr. Redmond's dinner table denied themselves nothing in the way of speech. Nor when the cigarettes were handed round did they show the usual feminine reluctance to light up. Though this may have been a protest on their part against the effeminacy of the age, for it was a remarkable fact at Mr. Valentine Redmond's parties that, though the elderly ladies invariably smoked, none of the young gentlemen indulged a nicotine. When the men rejoined us in the drying room I found myself, to my surprise, the center of a small group of attentive youths. One sat on a footstool at my feet, another hung over the back of the sofa, while the third reclined among the cushions at my elbow. And they all asked if they might come and call. Afterwards I heard that Mr. Redmond had passed the word that I was charming, a dictum which they always accepted without questioning. Val and his friends invariably worshipped in a little crowd. After that night Mr. Valentine Redmond was pleased to indulge in one of his wild enthousiasms. He brought all his boys to see me one by one and insisted that they should admire me as much as he did, which was as tiresome for them poor things as for me. My photograph, framed in golden turquoise's, was for exactly five weeks a conspicuous object on his drying room table, after which for a fortnight it stood on a cupboard in a dark corner, and finally I here disappeared altogether, to the limbo with the rest of his departed enthousiasms languish. But I am anticipating the catastrophe. For six weeks at least Val and I saw a good deal of each other. At one of our big parties Mr. Redmond and some of his young friends made quite a little sensation when they appeared. They were all clean shaven and all had tired eyes, exaggerated buttonholes, and shoes of phenomenal luminosity. Gracious heavens! whispered Christina when she saw them all file in. They always went about in cab fulls. What are they? Where did you find them? And what's to be done with them now they're here. But Valentine Redmond and his friends never wanted amusing. They all had a passion for being introduced to other young men of their own age, and failing that they gathered together in corners and smirked over their own little jokes. The chief amusement of these boys I soon found out was to go to music halls. They spoke of Miss Bessie Bellwood with baited breath, and would hear of no other comedians than Mr. Arthur Roberts and Mr. Albert Chevalier. They had a positive infatuation for acrobats for those stout, bespangled gentlemen who tie themselves into knots and balance themselves on each other's heads with a fixed smile to the accompaniment of a spirited Waltz tune. It was Val Redmond's delight to get two or three smart women to dinner with a corresponding number of boys and then to take the party on to the empire or to the pavilion. Why do you like tumblers and topical songs so much? I asked Val one day when I had refused for the fourth time a pleading invitation to make one of a party to the Tivoli. He shrugged his shoulders and looked rather annoyed. Culture is such a bore, he said. On a besoin de son canaillis quelquefois. This London ideal lasted, I think, nearly two months and then as London ideals will it came to a painless death. Its end was hastened by gossips and it was killed with a mou. Val Redmond's ambition was to start a salon in Sloan Street but he has only succeeded so far in running a restaurant. Christina had said on one of her unameable days. Someone, of course, told Val. The rupture left no sense of loss. Though good-looking, clever and amusing, Val Redmond's personality somehow left one cold. It was an essentially thin nature. Had I ever had occasion to appeal to his help, his sympathy, I fancy I should have had a charming, gushing little note to say that he was going out of town. One had an uneasy feeling that his devotion was only meant for dinner parties. His little compliments were like his bonbons, the accompaniments of the box he offered you at the play. Once a year or so we still go and dine with Val. The swinging lamp, the spreading palms, the wealth of hot-house flowers are always there but it is the rarest thing to find the same face. Our host renews his friends as often as the bouquets in his buttonhole. Chapter 6 of My Flirtations by Ella Hepworth-Dixon This LibriVox recording is in the public domain. The provincial young man has never possessed any attractions for me and it is certain that if I had not gone up north to stay with Daisy Drysdale I should never have known so well such a striking specimen of the type as Dr. Stiles. He was not a bad fellow but he was naively pleased with himself and his belongings. Your provincial indeed is rarely modest. In the limited circle of country-town society a suitable young man is pursued with too much pertinacity and ardour to have any doubts in his own mind as to his personal desirability and manifold charms. Dr. Stiles was a stoutish person of thirty-two with nondescript features and a slow, portentious manner along with a large and increasing practice in the suburb of Northa where his medical skill was in constant request among the spinsters and widows of that somewhat damp and chilly neighbourhood. So highly esteemed were his services in the sick room that these ladies would send for him at all hours of the day or night until the good doctor in self-defense took to sending his red-haired assistant to some of his more flagrantly imaginary inbillards. Daisy Drysdale's husband was a manufacturer in Mudchester and like other manufacturers he lived as far away from the factory chimneys of that thriving city as possible. So his brand-new red-brick mansion lay on the other side of the suburb of Northa and the society of Northa supplied nearly all Mrs. Drysdale's intellectual recreation. Poor Daisy! How she missed London! And what, as she plaintively asked, was the use of her giving little dinners seeing the component elements of which her parties were to be hence-forward composed. Until she was not to be baffled, and Mrs. Drysdale constantly entertained. She kept open house, too, and was delighted to see people drop in of an evening. The very night I arrived by some chance Dr. Stiles came in about nine o'clock. They were playing wist at one end of the long drawing-room and I was set down to entertain the doctor at the other. I shall not easily forget that night, accustomed to the manifestly insincere gushings of London young men, I was amused at the naïve manner in which this country-esculapias comported himself. For a long time we talked of the last exhibition at Burlington House, for he remembered Father's pictures and was much impressed, apparently, by the fact that he was talking to an academician's daughter. The provinces are still impressed by the Royal Academy. They played more than one rubber of wist that night, but Dr. Stiles remained until the end. Before he left he had offered to lend me a horse, proposed that he should drive me to a ruin ten miles off and expressed a wish that I should know his three sisters. The drive to the ruin had assumed the proportions of a picnic before three days were over. Life, as someone has justly observed, would be tolerable if it were not for its pleasures, and possibly our English summers would be less dreary to look back upon were it not for the inevitable picnic. The day declared itself gray and chilly with watery looking clouds hanging despondingly overhead, but as it was not actually raining we of course felt obliged to start. The doctor drove Mrs. Drysdale and me, and as he had to stop and see several patients on his way out of Northall, we were three quarters of an hour late when we arrived on the festive scene. We found our friends reclining on rugs and cushions in a damp field where there was an unmistakable odor of manure. We found also that they were already more than half through the meal, for as they justly observed the cold had made them uncommonly hungry, though the quantity of well picked bones and empty bottles sufficiently proclaimed the fact. But the mention of empty bottles suggests an air of hilarity which did not belong to this particular feast. A number of total abstainers were of the party, and these had brought their own supply of parry, lemonade, and mineral waters, and now sat apart round one tablecloth surveying with somewhat unsheap-like glances the goats who were imbibing shandy gaffe and claret. This attitude on the part of non-alcoholic Northall not being conducive to sociability, the party as a whole cannot be said to have been, as the French say, of a mad gaiety. The doctor did his best, but he had not the light social touch. If he offered you the salad it was with a portentous air, or did he spread you a cushion he never dropped his professional manner. Several unto-word accidents marred what was left of the day. A young lady had hysterics at the back of the ruin and the doctor who was fetched just when he was showing me the view from the topmost turret muttered something distinctly on Galant about his prospective patient as he hurried off. A drizzle began just as the tea was laid and the rain fell in dismal earnest as we drove home to Northall. The next time I saw our friend Dr. Stiles my head was tied up in a flannel shawl and my throat was so swollen that I could hardly speak. The doctor had been called in professionally. The Northall picnic had been too much for a Londoner unignored to the climate and I was down with a malignant sore throat. The doctor came every day and once he came twice to work a patent inhaler and paint my throat with some mysterious compound. He constantly changed the treatment. It was as if he never could do enough. He even used to bring me flowers and whoever heard of a doctor taking his patient flowers. Daisy was convulsed with amusement. She said that when she was ill she sometimes used to have to send for Dr. Stiles two or three times before he appeared. He was so busy. At the end of a week I was better and in ten days I was quite well. I really felt very grateful for I knew that the doctor had saved me by his constant care from a dangerous illness. I wonder if he took my gratitude for… something else? Anyway, as I told Christina when she scolded me for the whole affair it was not my fault. The thing came quickly to a crisis. We were all invited to spend an evening at the doctor's house. In the north they have a mysterious meal called high tea which is apparently a source of no little comfort and even of self-righteousness. It enables the habitual partakers thereof to allude witheringly to the late dinner indulged in by inhabitants of the south and so if you are invited out in North Ah be sure you will be regaled on tea and cold chicken, fearful mixture, on hot cakes, jam, marmalade and current buns. To this evening meal then we were bitten by Dr. Stiles. He lived alone with his sisters who were curiously like him. They were all stoutish with nondescript features and had solemn and somewhat solid manners. To see all four of them together inclined one to indecent mirth. It was impossible to be more worthy, more dull and more self-satisfied. They sat in a circle in the long drawing room on rather uncomfortable chairs. All three of the Mrs. Stiles took great interest in church matters or at least in the curate who was unmarried and whom they consulted very often on the subject of soup tickets and flannel petticoats. The curate and a boy of about nineteen years of age with a shrill voice were the other men of the party. Mrs. Stiles, the eldest of the three Mrs. Stiles, was a capital housekeeper. Everything went like clockwork in the doctor's roomy house. The early dinner was served to a minute. Two o'clock was the hour. If the doctor were out, the meal proceeded with unveiling punctuality, a slice of mutton being kept hot in the oven for the master of the house. On the long, bare, lavender-colored walls of the drawing room hung several watercolors by Mrs. Louisa. Indeed, the Mrs. Stiles were considered to have a pretty taste for art. They painted everything within reach with sprawling red roses or startling white daisies, the doctor being of opinion that his sister's artistic talent was of the first order. Miss Ada, too, was musical and sang songs by Ben-Suti and Milton Wellings. The doctor liked Miss Ada's vocal efforts. Miss Emily was literary. At least she assiduously read Miss Edna Lyle and Mr. Rider Haggard and of these authors we discussed solemnly until tea was announced. The table groaned with good things, with buttered toast, with salad, with vague dishes covered with custard, with ham, with quivering blommage. The currant, it transpired, had a phenomenal appetite, though he coughed and expostulated when helped to a third serve of pressed beef. Both he and the shrill-voiced boy had been among the abstaining sheep at our picnic. This evening meal, therefore, washed down by tea and coffee had obviously no terrors for them. The conversation was not of the kind that dazzles. There were frequent pauses during which Miss Ada made several bald statements about a forthcoming village concert, and the doctor, wishing to show his knowledge of the town, solemnly inquired if I had seen Mr. Irving in Henry VIII. The air was full of ominous portents. The doctor's manner, when he invited me for the second time to partake of cold chicken or pressed upon me with northern hospitality, the current cake was full of a certain protecting pride while a humbly conquering expression was in his eyes when they rested upon me. It was with attention, as the French say, that he showed me the photograph album full of aunts and cousins after tea. The good doctor looked quite sentimental when, later on, Miss Ada wore bolder romance with Walt's accompaniment entitled The Love That Will Never Fade. I began to feel restless. More than once did I cross the room, engage either of the Mrs. Stiles in feverish conversation, I always ended by finding the doctor at my elbow. At last I resigned myself to my fate and sat down to talk to him. I imagined that the sanitary state of the suburb of Northa would be a safe subject and one unlikely to lead to a declaration of a tender nature, but in this it appeared I was mistaken. We got on to the subject of fevers and, to convince me on a certain point, the doctor suggested a reference to one of the medical books in his surgery. Once inside the little room which lay just across the passage, Doctor Stiles shut the door and advanced towards me with that particular expression which is so intolerable in a man one doesn't care for. I put on my most indifferent manner and inspected with much interest the rows of medical books in their glass case. So kind of you, I said hurriedly to fill up the dreadful pause to take so much trouble. Most doctors only laugh at you if one wants to know any real fact. About your dreadful trade I added with flippancy seeing that the man was not listening to a word I was saying, but was gazing at me as an amiable snake might be said to regard a sparrow. Trouble, he said at last. How can anything be a trouble that is done for you? I wish you would let me tell you how much I, how much I. A sharp rap at the door interrupted this speech. A servant came in. Please, sir, Mr. Brown is very bad and Mrs. Brown says will you come at once and bring some of the drops and she hopes you won't belong? A three-mile drive, said Doctor Stiles with a sigh, and I shall not see you again to-night. He took my hand and held it fast. I will bring the book to-morrow morning. While I have a chance of seeing you alone. Try to be alone when I come, and wrenching my hand violently the doctor disappeared. Daisy, I said hurriedly in the carriage going home. I'm sorry to say, dear, I shall have to go home by the ten-fifteen to-morrow. I, I had a telegram just before we came out. You had a fiddle-stick. What nonsense, Peggy! Why you came to stay a month and you've hardly been twelve days. Twelve days? Good heavens! Why, how has he— Oh, it's that, is it? And so you don't like him? Well, I think you're silly. You might do much worse. How much better to settle down with someone like that than with one of your flippity London young men. He's sensible, clever, a good fellow, well off, and very fond of you. The ten-fifteen, please, Daisy. And sure enough, by the ten-fifteen I went. As the Yorkshire Fields flew behind me on my rapid journey back to London, the whole thing seemed like some nightmare from which I had just awoke. Great heavens! From what had I not escaped? A lifetime of high tea, suburban gossip, and provincial self-sufficiency, of rose-bedect door panels, the novels of Mr. Rider Haggart, and the love that will never fade. I am very fond of Mrs. Drysdale, but it will be a long time before I again trust myself to the seductions of that suburb of Mudchester. CHAPTER VII It was not very tragic. The first time I saw him and the last time I saw him I laughed, and the interval was not unamusing. Quite suddenly he had become the fashion. Some great lady in London, I forget who, had heard Claude Carson recite one of his own love-songs at a concert got up for a charity, and she had invited him to her house where he had met other women of fashion, and between themselves in their little set they had determined to make him the mode. It was at one of the Duchess of Birmingham's nicest parties, one of her small musical evenings that we first saw him. I had been away from town a month or two and was out of touch with London things, so that when someone said excitedly to me in the supper room, oh, come upstairs, Claude, Carson is going to recite, and I saw all the women trailing out of the room at once. I turned to the nearest young man to ask what it all meant. Oh, some cad with long hair who rolls his eyes about and recites erotic poems, meet him at every blessed place you go to, was the answer as my informant helped himself to plow over's eggs and reach for a fresh bottle of champagne. Upstairs, however, in the music room there was a flutter of excitement. A royal duchess was present, an event coupled with the fact that this new artist was going to perform favoring that kind of electric buzz in the air which is so precious to the ears of an anxious hostess. Round the grand piano was a line of pretty women, all with their eyes turned towards the seated figure at the music stool. There was perfect silence as Mr. Claude Carson rippled a few cords over the keys. I peeped over the shoulders of two or three people in front of me and saw a white face framed in long blonde hair which fell in one straight lock across the forehead. The eyes which were fixed on the corners of the ceiling were dark gray in color and full of what young ladies call soul. The nose was thin and straight, the lips full and beautifully curved, the jaw rather square and pathetically thin. It was a face out of a Byrne Jones picture. Then the long white hands moved rhythmically over the piano and Claude Carson, sweeping an ineffably weary glance along the line of pretty faces bent towards him, finally fixed his gaze on the royal duchess and began to recite, speaking his words in a rather monotonous tone to an accompaniment of ripples and cords. Ah, he is going to do that charming thing from his roses of fashion, the book which he is just going to publish. Somebody whispered excitedly. I like him best when he recites his own poems. First Mr. Claude Carson told us how he had met a young person in the twilight's mellow time and how the daisies had kissed her feet but how she, swerving beneath his glances, had flitted through the network fine of buds which blow in Hawthorne's glow. But eventually it appeared the lady had not proved so coy, for in the second verse Mr. Carson very justly remarked, But if you linger in that place beneath the Hawthorne's interlace, and I may gaze upon your face, shall love forgo sweet passion's flow. The stars alone look down on high, the winds alone repeat your sigh. No eyes are lonely-trist, describe, the little no, they little no. Fans waved in time to the quaint rhythm, necks were craned forward, eyes drooped and glistened, they were pensive smiles on curved lips. It was not very good, but there was something magnetic about this strange performance. Claude Carson effectually failed the stage. While he was reciting it was impossible to look in any other direction. And if the second twilight break, faint bird-notes sweet the morning make, and wondering world now reawake, and life reflow with love and woe, the new day finds us parted sweet, and new worlds open at our feet, once strange, as stranger shall we meet. We little no, we little no. He finished in a whisper which just filtered through his clenched teeth. An elderly gentleman coughed severely, and a couple of young ones, with faces as unemotional as their glistening shirt fronts, exchanged a swift expressive glance. The royal duchess beamed approval and signified that the reciter should be presented to her. The whole performance was a delightful interlude in the decorous solemnity of her exalted existence. I was the only woman in the room who laughed. I suppose it's an acquired taste, like caviar or absinthe, I said to a smart woman near me. But one has got to get accustomed to it. Why does he play the piano all the time if he's going to recite? The smart lady surveyed me with a withering glance. It's the most charming thing in London, she said. Claude Carson is a delightful person. All heads were turned in the direction of the young poet as he stood talking to the royal duchess, his beautiful eyes fixed on her face, while occasionally with a pretty fatigued movement he raised a white graceful hand and pushed back the lock of blonde hair from his forehead. Before the short conversation was over she had invited him to come and see her. It's stupid, hardly decent and almost incomprehensible, said Christina as we drove home, so I shouldn't wonder if he became the rage this season. And sure enough he did. One found him everywhere one went, and I had grown quite accustomed to the thrilling tones of his languorous voice, the enigmatic look in his deep-set eyes when one night he asked to be introduced to me. Everywhere, said Mr. Carson as he dropped into a chair at my side, everywhere I see your face. But until to-night I did not know who you were, he added softly. His tone, his manner annoyed me. Perhaps you didn't ask, I suggested, though an instant later I was sorry that I should have allowed myself to be flippant with a strange young man of whom I did not altogether approve. And then he did something which showed that he was clever. He gazed at me in perfect silence for several minutes until the memory of my flippant words had quite died away. Come, he said at last in his thrilling tones, let me give you some strawberries. I took his arm and went. We had a charming time that night. Claude Carson was less absurd than he looked. Under his little affectations there was a boyish Frank personality which was really attractive, and when he could forget the fact that all the women in the room were staring at him and remember that he was not expected to keep up the character of a modern menisanger while he helped you to quails and plover's eggs he was a nice, simple boy. Once by the by I heard that he was at least eight and twenty, but he was one of those fair, clean-shaven individuals who never look as if they had emerged from their teens. I want to come and see you, said Claude Carson that night, holding my hand as we stood under the portico waiting for the carriage. When may I come? We are at home on Sundays at five. Not then, not in a crowd of people, he pleaded. I want to see you alone. Oh, in that case, I answered laughing. Don't come on a Sunday. Come, say, on Wednesday, and then you will see Christina. But Christina, when he finally appeared, found him impossible. She said that his hands were too white and that the shape of his collar was revolting. She did not like his poems. Generally she did not understand what they meant and when she did she said she wished she hadn't. Claude Carson began to come a good deal. He was always dropping in at tea time and he never failed to look reproachful if he found me pouring out tea for Mr. Mandel, Val Redmond, or Tony Lambert. He would sit in a low chair leaning back and regarding me with half-closed eyes, a habit which Christina declared was insufferable. Indeed she generally remembered she had letters to write when Mr. Carson called. I have come to offer you what I prize most in the world, he said one day when we were alone. But I never take things, anything but flowers. I mean, from people, I objected hastily. Ah, but you will, you must accept this. I dedicate to you my roses of passion, the first born of my brain. Dear child, they are yours. He handed me a bit of paper on which was written. To M.W. These, my first trembling chords on the instrument of life, I dedicate to you. Perfect soul framed in your strange, a subtly sweet beauty I worship you from without with never a thought of earthly girdon. Fools only wish to pluck the star from the heavens, the lily from its stem. I leave my star in the blue vault, my lily in its garden. London, February, 1890 blank. Oh, I said, how nice! Only you mustn't put two M.W., you had better put three stars. I shall know who you mean. We sat and talked for a long time in the twilight. It was the end of February, and the late afternoon was tinged with the pale, wandering light of an early English spring. The trees outside were swelling with purple buds, and through the black branches there was the gleam of a tender, rosy sunset. It was the time of confidences, and the kind of day one says all sorts of things one doesn't mean in a soft, regretful voice just because they sound well and seem to fit into the emotional hour. Claude Carson knelt on the window-seat, his blond hair turned to pale gold against the window-pane. You have helped me more than any woman I have ever known, he said at last with a sigh. Have I? I asked, touched, flattered, and pleased. I was at an age when a girl likes to be called a woman. I'm sure I don't know how. What have I ever done for you? He gazed at me for a few seconds and then turned abruptly away. You have made my life happier, he said. In another instant he had pressed my hand and was gone. Christina's dry tones called me back to mundane things. And so you have had that impossible young man here for hours, said my sister, bursting into the room with all the matter-of-fact and common sense which an afternoon out of doors brings with it. May I ask if you intend to make a fool of him, too? To make a fool of him? No. I don't think I shall ever be able to do that. And my words, to be sure, came true. A little while after we were driving one afternoon towards Hammersmith when suddenly the coachman pulled up. A huge dray had got across the road and, for a few moments, we were obliged to wait while a small crowd urged the horses this way and that. We had stopped in a street of small stucco houses whose weedy front gardens were suggestive of anything but rural delights. And then, as we waited, a thin undersized child of seven ran out of one of the open-hall doors, a door which revealed a vision of a perambulator, a shabby oil-cloth and a framed oleograph, and hung staring over the green-painted rails. How dare you! Come in directly, ermant root! said a quarelless voice, and for an instant I caught a glimpse of a rather good-looking young woman in a cheap tailor-made gown. I shall tell your father, you are a most disobedient child. A moment later a young man strode down the graveled path, seized the undersized child in his arms, kissed her, and carried her indoors. Just as he disappeared in the doorway our eyes met. The young man was Claude Carson. So he is married, your modern menisanger, said Christina Driley, holding her chin up and looking straight in front of her as we drove on. Apparently, I said shrugging my shoulders and gazing at the coachman's back. I was not to be outdone in imperturbability by Christina. He has married the landlady's daughter, poets generally do. But it was considerate of him, she continued with a twinkle in the corner of her eye, to leave his star in the blue vault, his lily in its garden, seeing that he has already got one lily and a promising bud or two in cartoon gardens, Hammersmith. And then we both fell back on the cushions and gave way to uncontrollable giggles. I laughed till the tears ran down my cheeks. When will you learn sense, sighed Christina. CHAPTER VIII. OF MY FLIRTATIONS by Ella Hepworth-Dixon. This Libervox recording is in the public domain. VIII. You are so good and dear, repeated Julian Clancy for the second time in his well-bred-drawing voice, detaining my hand for an instant in the obscurity of his tapestry-hung hall. Mother, who always remembers she has an appointment in Hampstead or West Kensington just when one is beginning to enjoy oneself, was already at the bottom of the garden path. Mr. Julian Clancy slowly raised the hand he held to his lips. He was perfectly aware that this last century salute was considered irresistible by his women friends. He was a charming host. All the guests at Mr. Clancy's party seemed on easy terms. The men called each other by their Christian names. The ladies had quaint little nicknames for their friends. An atmosphere of intimate chat hung about the rooms. The women spoke in cooing tones and had interminable confidences to make, while the men laughed softly as they lent forward to listen with an amused air in the veiled lamp-light. It was distinctly a house where one enjoyed oneself. Julian Clancy would ask a dozen people, most of them well known, and he would find them when you arrived chatting with soft intimate voices in obscure corners or loitering as they whispered the latest malicious story in the draped doorways. Not that Julian Clancy himself ever listened to malicious stories. Though he wrote novels of modern society, lived all the year round in London, and was now over forty years of age, it was astonishing how guileless, how optimistic he remained. His vague face and worn smile suggested only the most indefinite emotions, and yet the warmth of his language was extraordinary. Every one he knew was a dear or a dear person, while the more favoured ones were so perfectly good and sweet. Julian Clancy would not listen to a word against anyone. How could people be so horrid as to say that his dear lady Rougemont's beautiful red hair was dyed, or that his charming charlie-deuce ace was not the most exemplary of husbands? People were so unkind. Well off and well connected, he mixed in the best as well as the rapidest sets in London, but what he really worshipped was the celebrity. It is an error to suppose that all the Leo hunters are of the feminine sex. Julian Clancy always had the last celebrity, and failing that, the last notoriety, at his parties in St. John's Wood. He adored St. John's Wood. Celebrated artists, actors, dramatists were all to be found within a stone's throw of his door. He could run in and out of famous studios and catch distinguished actors for his little suppers on their way home from the theatres. He tolerated a countess, if she happened to be amusing, but a new dancing girl set him raving. He used to ask great ladies to meet the most extraordinary people, and somehow or other they always came. His Sunday dinners, of eight, were most amusing. One never knew if one would sit next to a guardsman, a burlesque actor, or the representative of a foreign power. He knew everybody, and everybody wanted to know him. The honourable Julian Clancy, second son of Lord Basings Stoke, had a position in society which is not often the lot of younger sons. But then, to be sure, his brother had no children, and was already separated from his wife. In all human probability, Julian would one day succeed to the earldom. And yet he, for his part, was chiefly preoccupied with literary fame. Every other year or so he published, at his own expense, a rather second rate novel, which however had one merit. It was usually in one volume, with fat print and wide margins, so that when he presented it to his friends with charming little enthusiastic phrases written on the first page, they were able to get a good idea what it was about without being at the pains to read it. About the time his book appeared, he usually gave one of his pleasantest parties, where one saw him with one arm round the neck of some young man who wrote reviews for the penny papers. In former days, when he was younger and less gushing, Mr. Julian Clancy had been in the diplomatic service and had wandered in many lands. He never wandered now. As a matter of fact, he never left London. Every year, when other people were making their autumn plans, he would point to his garden with its pear trees and hollyhocks, its plashing fountain and cooing doves, and ask you plaintively why he should leave it. September, January or June, he would stroll down St. James Street to his club at five o'clock. Every year, as soon as August came, a paragraph went the round of the gossipy papers chronicling the fact that Mr. Julian Clancy never left town. People thought it so original and charming. He had quite a little notoriety on that account alone. But London, to be sure, was a passion with him. The pavement of Piccadilly was to him what the boulevard is to the Parisian. He was miserable five miles from Bond Street, and I have known him to rave about the exquisite effects one saw in a London fog. Julian Clancy made a cult of the metropolis. His house, in springtime, buried in a white cloud of pear blossom, in summer shady with spreading chestnut trees and limes, was one of the prettiest things in town. A low, two-storeyed cottage with queer-shaped rooms built out at odd angles, it was draped, arranged, and furnished with an artist's hand. His music room, with its polished floor and oriental walls contained a nothing but a grand piano, a huge spreading palm, and a low downy divan running round the sides. But through a Kyrene archway you stepped into a drawing-room crowded with knick-knacks hung with old brocade, and as dainty as the boudoir of some eighteenth-century beauty. In the dining-room the prim, thin chip-and-dale furniture was ranged against a pale-colored wall while the round table, with its fine damask and Georgian silver and the soft lamplight illuminating a great bowl of flowers, was somehow suggestive of brilliant talk and dainty fare. But Mr. Clancy was always modest about his possessions. It's so sweet of you to like my things, he would say deprecatingly to some fashionable lady who was going round his room sniffing up ideas. I never care for anything I have. It's so good of you to like my poor little cottage. He came very often to our Sunday evening parties when about twelve o'clock one saw his fatigued expressionless features and his superb shirt front appear in the studio doorway. He was one of the men by the by, who looked their best at night, the sharp black and white of man's evening dress giving him a distinction and elegance which he somewhat lacked. At first I did not know why he came so often. Father, to whom he regularly offered up some of his choices phrases, never liked him, and took no particular pains to conceal the fact. Two mother, all young men, especially in the evening, are alike. She looks upon them as necessary evils at our parties, but makes few distinctions between them. Christina was away that season, so there remained only myself. As the years had passed on I had had experience enough to know that a man who is heir presumptive to an English earldom is not likely to preoccupy himself with the middle-class damsel of modest dowry. What brought him then so often to our house? Time as usual revealed the secret and in this wise. July with its damp garden parties was upon us. Mr. Julian Clancy's annual outdoor fete was one of the events of the late summer. He arranged the thing charmingly and people intrigued for cards to what was sure to be an amusing party. This year it was rumored he was to have the whole of the frivolity chorus girls attired as milkmaids to dance skirt dances on his velvety lawn. So everybody wanted to go. For some time beforehand Mr. Clancy was indefatigable in his cause at our house. He talked as much as he ever talked about anything of his own, for he was only enthusiastic about other people in their parties which were always perfectly charming or too lovely of his forthcoming entertainment. I do so hope you'll come, he said. I want you all to come. It would be so sweet and good of you all to come to my little party. Oh, we don't go about in droves, I said laughing. Won't one or two of the family be enough? Of course I only insist upon you, said Julian with a shade of his old diplomatic manner, but I should be so proud if your father would come. A light flashed over me. This then was a possible explanation of Mr. Julian Clancy's devotion. He was hunting a celebrity. He wanted my father. How dense I had been to be sure. Father was not only a famous and successful royal academician, but he was one of the most amusing people in town. The day of the garden party I was all diplomacy and white muslin. Early in the afternoon I captured my distinguished parent and insisted on his accompanying me to St. John's Wood. I was not going to appear without him as a second-rate substitute for a celebrity. The sleepy suburban road was alive with carriages and cabs as we drove up, and at every turn you nodded to some well-known face. The clean-shaven profile and heliotrope necktie of Duncan Clive, the actor, were seen in a Victoria side-by-side with Lady Susan's extraordinary hat. Her ladyship had long ago given up chaperones as superfluous. Val Redmond, Tommy Singleton, and the pale-faced boy foamed out of a handsome, hull-blue buttonholes and light gloves. The Duchess of Birmingham was driving up in the dookal chariot and had brought Miss Van Hoyt. There was no end to the people one knew. Inside the house it was dark and hot, and in the oriental music room you could hardly stand, for a famous primadonna was lamenting in a piercing soprano voice, and an indifferent Italian accent, the absence of her beloved, while a small red-haired cavalry major told a funny story in a high, penetrating voice until several people said, hush, and turned round and frowned. In the dining-room one saw a vista of backs pushing and struggling over a buffet, and there was an acrid odor of coffee and strawberries as you passed the open door to reach the garden. Outside the scene was pretty enough. In the green garden the pink and mauve and white dresses of the women made clear patches on the verdeur, and smiling fatigued faces greeted each other from under fantastic hats. A Viennese band played beneath a huge cedar. The frivolity girls with their crinkled white frocks and painted cheeks, looking pinker than ever under their starched sunbonnets, stood huddled together in the distance and nudged each other as they recognized several smart young men who with imperturbable faces were handing water-rises to the season's debutants. Presently the band struck up a catchy air, and the girls farming into a line against a background of ivy flipped their loose skirts and executed a series of swaying movements with fixed mechanical smiles. The youngest, a thing of seven with thin pointed knees, had the most surprisingly wooden smile of all. She was like a miniature, but exaggerated copy of the showy girls who towered above her. There was a great deal of applause when they had done, and only the smart young men appeared to be but vaguely interested in the performance. Our host, as usual, was charming, but one felt that something distracting was in the air. One side and Mr. Julian Glancy's preoccupied face as he gushed a little over us both, making a civil effort when we entered. Something important was gone inside the house from the glances which our host kept turning towards the open drying room windows. What could it be? We were not long left in doubt. Oh, have you heard? cried Val Redmond, detaining us with a delighted giggle. Menkowski, the Russian who says he has been to the North Pole, is in there in the drying room. He is such a delightful person. They say he is a leper, but I don't believe that, though I dare say you can catch it from the Eskimo. If I were you I should only look at him through the window in case it is true you know. He certainly is a very odd color. This then was the reason of Mr. Glancy's tepid enthusiasm over father's appearance. Nankowski, the famous Nankowski, was a very great celebrity, the newest of the season, and he was now holding an informal levée in the drying room where people were being introduced to him in shoals. Mr. Julian Glancy it was obvious had forgotten his ardor for my father in the triumph of securing a lion with a more penetrating roar. Dear, I said twenty minutes later when we had wandered round the garden shaking hands right and left. I'm afraid this sort of thing bores you. Let's go home and have tea together in the studio. Just you and I. We looked for our host, but he was not visible. As we crossed the hall, however, we saw his back for an instant through the open drying room door. He was quite absorbed and did not hear us going out. Mr. Julian Glancy was bending over the new celebrity, and we could hear him saying in his slow, well-bred tones. It was so good and lovely of you to come. CHAPTER IX It was at the Royal Academy at the private view that I first saw Mr. Albert Morris. Outside the bright spring sunshine bathed Piccadilly with its unaccustomed warmth gilding the tiny crinkled leaves in the green park making blue shadows under the crowded omnibuses and illuminating the clinking hardness of the horses which passed in a continual procession into the courtyard of Burlington House. Inside, up the wide staircase with its crimson carpets and its banks of flowers and plants, all London was elbowing its way to the crowded galleries. People who had intrigued successfully for a ticket were a triumphant satisfied smile. The critics were preparing their most solid yet important air. Women journalists felt for their pencils and notebooks eagerly demanding the names of overdressed ladies and the painters. The Royal Academy missions and the few famous outsiders who are invited to the private view collected in little knots around some much-discussed canvas or plucking each other by the sleeve hurried through the rooms in search of some striking picture by an unknown brush. But Mr. Morris hurried neither here nor there, for he was a person of importance. He stood in the middle of the big room casting cursory glances at the pictures on the walls and shaking hands with a small procession of people who passed incessantly in front of him, with fashionable ladies who stopped to give him several fingers and then passed on with a well-turned phrase and a non-committing smile, with journalists, judges, actors and cabinet ministers. We came upon him suddenly, father and I, and when I had been introduced he seemed all at once to have a great deal to say. Mr. Albert Morris was about fifty years old and had a humorous eye. He was rather fat and rather red and I think his hair and mustache were very carefully dyed. He was absurdly rich. One of the big weekly papers belonged to him and he owned a good many shares in the opera. Mr. Morris also bought pictures and was invited nearly every year to the Royal Academy banquet. Everything he touched turned to gold. He had the true instinct of his race for money. Albert Morris made fabulous sums out of the most unlikely things and they say that he was once seen driving through the city in a four-wheel cab piled to the ceiling with Argentine bonds. He never went farther away from town than Brighton in order to be always within an hour of the stock exchange. But with all his money and his influence he was the simplest of men and had only two strongly developed tastes, a liking for a good story and a pretty woman. His house in Piccadilly was it is through a little over gorgeous, but then he had left the furnishing and decorating to a well-known firm who had somewhat overdone the Louis sixteenth period. Nobody however including the owner seemed to think there were too many carved gilt legs and florid brocades and in the celebrated white dining room with its vannals by Chaplin Mr. Albert Morris used to give little suppers to royalty. He was a self-made man and he believed in money. He had bought everything, his position, his influence, his friends, his newspaper, his house, his pictures, his books and curios, the love of women and the devotion of his servants. There was only one thing he dreaded and that was a thing from which his millions could not save him. He was horribly afraid of death. Possible accidents or illnesses were a constant anxiety to Mr. Morris. He was childishly frightened of infectious diseases. He never went to bed without a ladder outside his window in case of fire and he never sat behind or on a strange horse. If his little finger ached or he caught a cold in the head, he consulted the greatest physicians in London and he always carried a tiny golden flask containing brandy for someone had once told him he had a weak heart. Poor Mr. Morris quaking in the midst of his millions. They found him one morning but I am anticipating. Though of thoroughly Jewish origin it was astonishing how British and patriotic was my new friend Mr. Morris. His newspaper was conservative and highly orthodox and in time of war scares there was an uncompromising jingoism in its leaders. They were inspired by the proprietor. The church, the state, the house of lords, who knows if the estimable little man may not have cherished hopes of a peerage himself were the things that Mr. Morris believed in. In religion he did not tolerate broad church nor in politics any dallying with Democrats. But these things after all were but a pastime. The opera, especially during the last year or two, was the serious preoccupation of his life. Charm and little girl of yours, windman, I overheard him whisper to father as we were moving on, might bring her one night to the opera now. Always the same box, you know. Pit-tier, number one hundred, say Thursday. And without waiting for an answer for he was evidently accustomed to having his wishes exceeded to, Mr. Morris slipped away and was presently in deep confabulation with the leader of the opposition. On the following Thursday we found ourselves in Mr. Morris's opera box. It was a brilliant night. All the beauties with all their tea-arison were ranged in dazzling groups round the house. Two famous sisters, one married to a marquee and the other on the way to espouse a German princeling, were dressed exactly alike and exhibited precisely the same pence of smile and the same drooping bokeh. They were, however, tonight entirely alone, filling the large box with their pink sleeves and their radiant beauty. Just above them Lady Susan received a procession of smart young men all the evening. One after the other the smart young men were convulsed with laughter. You could see their stall at faces getting pink and crinkled as they bent forward to catch what the lady said. In the next box a well-got-up mother and a pretty, badly-dressed girl shared the same cavalier between them. It was impossible to tell which he admired the least. An elderly lady in pale blue satin and black pearls exhibited a young and sheepish-looking husband. Mr. Valentine Redmond was supposed to be occupying a stall, but his little smirk and his huge white button-hole appeared in every box on the grand-tier that night. A number of cultured people in the stalls had opened books of the score on their knees and never raised their heads to the stage all the evening. They were playing tristan and his old. Mr. Albert Morris swept with his glasses the crimson horseshoe on which the white shoulders and clear dresses of the women made spots and dots of light and settled himself in his chair with a small grunt of approval. He felt, in a way, responsible for that brilliant house. He was one of the people who had revived the Mora Bandopra and had made it once more the most fashionable lounge in London. True, he distrusted Wagner and all his works, but he knew there was money in him for a season. He was more proud of his sway behind the scenes than of any other influence he possessed. He prided himself on discovering budding patties and malbas, unearthing unknown tenors and discovering baritones of genius. The potains of the green room, the little quarrels behind the scenes were I verily believe the joy of his existence. He had always a good story to tell about the stars of the company. To spring a new prima donna on the town was the height of his ambition. One liked Mr. Albert Morris at once. He was immensely comic and had a slow, fat, drawing voice which made his stories irresistible. He was also delightfully candid. Like all the men of his race he was easily touched by music, and when the famous soprano in white satin with her hair down her back gave forth an operatic lament, I noticed a large tear coursing its way down Mr. Albert Morris's Rubicon cheek and immaculate shirt front. Ah, these things make me feel, Miss Winman, he whispered, but then you see I'm a wicked old sinner. It's only you charming young ladies who are so hard. It was impossible not to laugh, especially when Mr. Morris put on a gold-placed knee and holding the book of words a long way off tried to find out what the story was. What's it all about now? Don't understand, German. Oh, here we are. Act one. They tremble and convulsively put their hands to their hearts, then again pressed them to their foreheads. Their eyes meet anew, sink in confusion, and once more fastened on each other with looks of increasing passion. Hum. He's old, sinking on his breast, faithlessly fondest, Tristan, pressing her to him with fire, deathlessly dearest. Ah, very unfortunate now as she's going to marry the other Johnny. Never have any luck, these poor little heroines. Beautiful eyes, see that? He's in great form tonight. But later on Mr. Morris was again bewildered by the language of the libretto, which he insisted on reading aloud. Oh, highest, holest, fairest, fiercest, brimming just bliss. Priceless, peerless, fixed and fearless, blind and breathless. Now I call that exaggerated, don't you know? Did you ever talk to Mrs. Wynman like that now, Wynman? Nobody ever says that sort of thing to me. But in spite of Mr. Morris's objections to the Wagnerian methods, our evening at the opera ended amably all round. Before we separated that night he had given father a commission for a big canvas. Samson and Delilah was to be the subject of the picture, for Mr. Morris had a taste for the good old themes. And yet when the picture was half finished he began to see that it was rather out of date for a modern house. Should you like to put Miss Peggy in now? Said Mr. Morris one day as we all three sat criticising the huge canvas. Nort suitable for Delilah, eh? It was one of his peculiarities that he pronounced Nort and Gott like Nort and Gort. Want a more robust model? Nort at all. Just the sort of little girl like Miss Peggy. That father was inexorable. I had sat to him as a baccanti, as a village maiden, and as a nun, but for Delilah he would have none of me. Mr. Morris was obviously disappointed. He used to be always dropping in to see how Samson and Delilah was getting on, and he not infrequently stayed to lunch. Charmin! Hasht mutton, just what I like. Anything does for me. Gord a passion for baked potatoes, dear. Said Mr. Morris who feasted like Lucullus at home. It was another of his peculiarities by the by that he usually addressed the whole female sex as dear. Mr. Morris chaffed everybody, from the editor of his paper to the cabman who drove him to the city. He even chaffed Christina. On one celebrated occasion when Christina had turned vegetarian, she sat eating nothing but watercress, lettuce, and endive all through lunch. My heavens! Said Mr. Morris at last, adjusting his eyeglass, and regarding Christina placidly munching a third plate of raw green stuff. Is this a beautiful woman, or a ruminate an animal? From that day forward Christina ate fish, meat, and fowl like the rest of the family. Samson and Delilah was finished at last, and to celebrate the hanging of the picture there was to be a little supper in the white dining room in Piccadilly at which a royal personage was expected to be present. But Mr. Morris was not to eat his supper with royalty in Piccadilly that night. On the morning of the party, a foggy November day, Mr. Morris's valet drove up to our door in a handsome. His white, twitching face told us the worst. Albert Morris was dead. And so after all his millions had not been able to save him from what he dreaded, a sudden and a comparatively early death. The servant's scared face was painful to see. He had been genuinely attached to Mr. Morris, and he had entered his room that morning with tea and letters to find the electric light still burning, and the figure of his master propped up in bed with a book in the hand that had been cold for many hours. It was a French book, the valet said. Fa, comme la mare, he thought the name was. Albert Morris had drawn his last breath while reading his favorite author. And that was the end. One had a chokey feeling in the throat when one thought of it. Of course in stories and plays it is only the death of the young, the handsome, and the virtuous which is meant to rouse our deepest pity. Yet in real life it is often the figure of an Albert Morris. Stout, genial, worldly, rolling in wealth, and terrified at death, which most readily claims our tears. Of the earth earthy we can only picture them in their clubs or at our dinner tables. In the grand drama of death it seems impossible that this should ever take apart. They, the heroes of half a dozen farces, the authors of half a hundred moe. End of chapter 9