'It depends where and with whom,' she replied with a touch of coquetry, but without a trace of English accent.
'Are you English?' I blurted out impulsively.
'Half-American, half-English,' she answered, smiling. Her smile lit up her face enchantingly; it was like coming from a shuttered room into sunshine.
'My case too,' I cried, 'only instead of English, you'd have to say half-Welsh.'
'Strange,' she replied, laughing outright, 'in my case, to be exact, you'd have to say half-Irish.'
'Let us both keep to our American halves,' I said, 'then there will be nothing strange in my presenting myself. I am Frank Harris and trying here in London to be a writer.'
'And my name is Laura Clapton.' A few more questions and in five minutes I found that she was living with her father and mother in Gower Street; her father was a stockbroker and I could call any afternoon. I had time to promise I'd come next day and tell besides how I was working on the Fortnightly Review and the Spectator, thanks chiefly to my knowledge of various countries and languages.
'I know some foreign languages, too,' said Miss Laura.
I was simply delighted to find her accent as good in German, French, Italian and Spanish as it was in English, and her command of the languages extraordinary: 'Two years spent with my mother in each country,' was her explanation.
Next day I called and was introduced to a little, round-faced, roly-poly of a mother. Very ugly, I thought, with pug nose and small gray-blue eyes, but in spite of face and figure, the little fat woman had an air of dignity, or, it would be truer to say, of imperiousness tinged with temper. When I met Queen Victoria later I was irresistibly reminded of Mrs. Clapton.
When Mr. Clapton came in the same evening, I saw where the daughter had got her good looks. Clapton was a handsome Irishman of perhaps five feet eleven, showing his fifty years in stoutness and greying hair. All his features were excellent, the hazel eyes splendid, and the man's personality genial and attractive. I easily understood how coming to Memphis, Tennessee, at five and twenty, the senator's daughter he met fell promptly in love with him. But he had been unfaithful and the proud southern girl wouldn't forgive him, and had taught her only daughter too to take her side, though in public the family held together. The whole situation was clear that first evening and I took an immediate liking to the good-looking, happy-go-lucky father, who probably out of custom kept up appearances with his unattractive wife for old affection's sake, and the pride he took in his daughter's looks and cleverness. For the daughter was undoubtedly clever and her looks grew on me: moving about in the room, taking off her hat and seating herself, the rhythmic grace of her beautiful figure made itself felt. I think from the beginning the mother disliked me as much as the father liked me. I found that Miss Laura loved the stage, had trained herself, indeed, to be an actress, and was only kept from going on the stage by the mother's insensate vanity and pride of birth. Naturally, I got them theatre tickets and soon became intimate.
A month or so later the father wanted to spend Christmas at Brighton; nothing could have suited me better. I knew Brighton well, so early in the week we went down and stayed at the Albion Hotel. In the mornings we all used to go out walking, but the fat mother soon returned to the hotel with her husband, leaving Laura and myself to our own devices. Two incidents I remember of those first days: I had put some rhetoric into an article in the Spectator on Hendrik Conscience, the Belgian writer, and I read it to Laura one afternoon. 'You read wonderfully,' she said, 'and that prose is lovely.
You're going to be a great writer!'
I shook my head. 'A good speaker, perhaps,' I said, for already I thought of going into the House of Commons.
I didn't believe that I had genius, but I felt sure I could make myself an excellent speaker, and naturally I confided my ambitions to her. She had risen, and as I rose and thrust the paper into my pocket, I repeated passionately the last words of the article. Her eyes were on a level with mine and I suppose the passion in my voice moved her, for her eyes gave themselves to me: the next moment my arms were around her and my lips on hers.
She kissed me naturally, without shyness or reserve. I could not help thinking at once, 'She has often given her lips; she's too good-looking to have been left unpursued.' The thought gave me boldness. 'How beautiful you are,' I said putting my arm round her waist.
She smiled but drew back a little. 'You flatterer!'
'No, no,' I pursued; 'not a taint of flattery; I'm so much in earnest that I'm absolutely truthful. Your figure is most beautiful: I love and admire small breasts, just as I admire and love large hips,' and I put my hands again on her figure.
'I love your word,' she responded, 'that you are 'so much in earnest that you are quite truthful,' deep love and truth always go together, don't they?'
'Always,' I replied. Her quick ears heard someone coming and she turned away, but the touches had thrilled me, and I could not forbear clasping her waist from behind. She wound herself out of my arms with infinite litheness and with pouting lips and frowning brows reproved my daring, but the finger on her mouth was a warning and her eyes were smiling: she was not really angry at all. The next minute her mother came in.
The situation of the father and mother filled me with pity for the girl; I felt in my bones that the father in especial must have called on her sometimes to help pay the weekly bills. She had been trained in worldly wisdom, yet had kept her spiritual enthusiasms. Her difficulties, which I surmised, endeared her to me.
On Christmas Eve we happened to be alone again in the sitting-room. After the first kiss I naturally kissed her whenever I had the chance, and under my kissing and caressing her lips grew hot. But she drew back almost at once.
'How strangely you kiss,' she said, her eyes thoughtful.
I loved her for her frankness and read it rightly, I think: she was still virgin, but on the point of yielding. I resolved to be worthy of her.
'Laura, dear,' I said, 'I want to speak to you soul to soul. I love you and want you: give me six months or at most a year more and I shall have won a position in London and money. I've done a good deal in four months; I'll win completely in a year. Give me the year, will you, and I'll ask you to marry me!'
'I love you,' she replied, 'and trust you. I'll wait, you can be sure,' and we kissed again as a sort of consecration-indeed as lovers kiss, whose spirits flow together at meeting of the lips.
The rest of those Christmas holidays can be told rapidly. I felt that Laura did not put much confidence in my assurances of splendid and rapid success. She had heard similar hopes expressed far too often by her father and had found them evaporate. I first heard the American word from her for such forecasts of hope, 'hot air.' How was she to know the difference between the gambler and the workman, whose self-confidence was rooted in many and widely different experiences?
I resolved to get back to London as soon as possible, and up to the last day, with the optimism of first love, I hoped to meet Laura there almost every day.
On the second of January I paid the hotel bill and was astonished by it; it took nearly all my nest-egg: Clapton had drunk champagne in his bedroom.
But what did it matter? I had had the time of my life and a smile from Laura's lips; a glance of approval from her eyes meant more to me than a fortune.
Just before lunch the father asked me to go out with him for a stroll. As soon as we were alone, he began by thanking me for the holiday. 'I'd never have let you foot the bill,' he began, 'but I've had a long run of bad luck in this open stock exchange I founded in London. My partner, I find, has bolted in my absence and taken all the funds, but I only need just a small sum for expenses, a thousand '11 do-'
I would not let him conclude; I wanted to spare him the humiliation of asking.
I broke in at once, 'I'd let you have it with a heart and a half if I had got it, but the truth is the holiday has brought me, too, to rock-bottom. I must go back and get to work, and I can't even get such a sum quickly. I say to you, as I've said to Laura, give me a year and I'll win.'
His look was enough; the splendid long hazel eyes were as hard as buttons.
'Never mind,' he said, 'it doesn't matter.' In ten minutes we were back in the hotel and I don't think I got ten words more from him that day. Evidently the father, too, thought me no prize.
When we reached London I drove them first to Gower Street, but their rooms were not ready for them. The father saw the landlady and came down to us in the hall and told us, with feigned indignation, that the hostess had
