Page:The Soft Side (New York, The Macmillan Company, 1900).djvu/108

100 and for her little girl—for their having lived as little as for their having died—she has nothing to show. She hasn't so much as a photograph, a lock of hair, or an announcement in a newspaper.'

Chilver thought. 'But perhaps she wouldn't naturally leave such things about the sitting-room of a Brighton lodging.'

'I dare say not. But it isn't only such things. It's tremendously odd her never having even by mere chance knocked against anything or any one that one has ever heard of or could—if one should want to—get at.'

Again Henry Chilver reflected. 'Well, that's what struck me as especially nice, or rather as very remarkable in her—her being, with all her attraction, one of the obscure seventy millions; a mere little almost nameless tossed-up flower out of the huge mixed lap of the great American people. I mean for the charming person she is. I doubt if, after all, any other huge mixed lap'

'Yes, if she were English, on those lines,' Braddle sagaciously interrupted, 'one wouldn't look at her, would one? I say, fancy her English!'

Chilver was silent a little. 'What you don't like is her music.'

His visitor met his eyes. 'Why, it's awfully good.'

'Is it? I mean her having, as you told me on the boat, given lessons.'

'That certainly is not what I most like her to have done—I mean on account of some of the persons she may have given them to; but when her voice broke down she had to do something. She had sung in public—though only in concerts; but that's another thing. She lost her voice after an illness. I don't know what the illness was. It was after her husband's death. She plays quite wonderfully—better, she says, really, than she sang; so she has that resource. She gave the lessons in the Sandwich Islands. She admits that, fighting for her own hand, as she says, she has kept some queer company.