Page:The Confessions of a Well-Meaning Woman.djvu/199

 what had I to offer? Nor did I feel constrained to beg for mercy or to ask what manner of life she proposed to leave for me. I hardly think that pride held me in check, but—somehow—to go on one’s knees to a young woman who started life on the stage was hardly. . . Well, as my boy would say, “It is not done.” I knew she was clever, I hoped to find her sensible; and then the only thing was to decide what to do. . . Of course I did not send up my name. . . “Say that a lady wishes to see her,” I told the maid.

And I was shewn upstairs readily enough. Not into the drawing-room; I think that class of person lives entirely in her bedroom. She was lying on the sofa in a kimono and—so far as I could judge from the generous opportunities which she insisted on giving me—nothing else; a lovely animal, as she was at pains that I should see, with perfect skin, a great mane of copper hair and golden-brown eyes. Very red lips, very white teeth; I was reminded of a soft, beautiful lion-cub. She moved and stretched herself like an animal, speaking as though she were only half-awake. I don’t think she could have been more than twenty. She left the stage to marry a man in the Air Force, I understand, and he was killed at the end of the war, leaving her