been my custom not only to tip liberally, but to take a personal interest in dependents, and so often I get extraordinary service. One evening I happened to come to the hotel with the news of a play that I knew would interest Laura. I was told by the head-waiter, whom I liked and often had a talk with, that Miss Clapton was in the small salon on the first floor; and he ran up obligingly and when we were at the door, he threw it wide open and turned away. Two persons, a man and a woman, were seated on the sofa opposite; the man must have had his arm round the girl from the startled way they sprang apart: it was Laura and some man who got up and stood waiting while she came over to me. 'I am surprised!' she said, with that astounding naturalness of the woman. 'What good wind blows you here?' I could hardly speak; jealousy seemed to have passed into cold, sardonic hatred: I could not trust myself to speak. I took out the tickets and handed them to her. 'Won't you wait for Mother?' she asked, smiling. I wonder I didn't strike her; I turned and went without a word.
I made up my mind then and there that I would never marry her. The mad rage of my jealousy frightened me; had I been married to her and had had the same shock, I might have killed her. All the way home I raged. I never knew who the man was; I never tried to find out: he was indifferent to me; it was her traitorism that counted. I sat down in my house and thought. 'Why rage?' I asked myself. 'Treat her as your mistress; simply tell her quietly that if you get one more suspicion, you'll never see her again. Let her know it's final. She doesn't want to lose your money and your little gifts: be ruthless.'
But no resolve did me any good. Behind my anger, my love moaned crying,
'Have I been so careless of you, my darling, that you wanted another affection? What have I failed to do? Love's service all planned and perfect, but not marriage, and Laura's as proud as Lucifer. Marry her tomorrow and she'll be faithful; it's not fair to the girl, this life as a kept mistress.' Almost I yielded, but the thought of her mother came between us. I'd have to invite her, be polite at least to her; impossible, and again I saw the man's arm drawn away from Laura's waist! I thought I should go mad.
I got up and rang the bell. Bridget, my servant, came in, and when she brought me the whisky and soda she said, 'You don't look well, Sir.'
'I don't feel well, Bridget,' I said. 'I've not eaten.'
'Oh, we can get you dinner at once, Sir; there's cold grouse in the larder,' and soon I dined while Bridget waited on me. She had lovely Irish eyes and was kindness itself. As she stood by me after helping me to something, I put my arm around her, and nothing loath, our eyes and then our lips met. Soon I found she cared for me and this spontaneous affection did me good, took the unholy rage and bitterness out of me and brought me back to quiet thoughts and sanity. To cut a long story short, I consoled myself with Bridget's affection and fresh prettiness, and the fears of madness all left me not to return for many a day.
Yet next day I was ruthless. Laura had a perfect explanation. 'He was a Scot; her mother had invited him to dinner and had then gone up to her room for something and left them together and-'
I smiled. 'Don't sit so close together on the sofa next time,' I said, 'or you'll never see me again. I mean it absolutely: you must make your choice.' Laura got furiously angry: what did I suspect; it was a public room: couldn't she sit with a friend? She had manifestly no idea of the storm of rage and hatred she had called to life in me. But conscious of a worse fault in myself, I was willing to forgive and if possible to forget; and I only record the fact in its naked brutality because it's true that I was really frightened of myself, frightened that I should never regain control and so snatched at the nearest way to sanity. But it led me further astray than I had imagined.
What held me to Laura so absolutely?
First of all, of course, there was the immediate attraction of good looks, but I had seen just as beautiful girls who did not attract me deeply. It was Laura's fine intelligence that pleased me so intimately, and especially the fact that her knowledge of languages gave her a cosmopolitan ideal and so allowed her to see the little peculiarities of the people surrounding us in a humorous light. Yet in spite of her amused disdain of English snobbishness and English reverence for mere conventions, she yet regarded the better class of English as the best people in the world, just as I did.
All these threads of attraction and sympathy combined to form a bond which was enormously strengthened by a single strand: she had one of the loveliest figures I've ever seen. I could stand admiring her nudity and studying it by the hour: gradually my passionate admiration took away her shamefacedness and she would strip for me, always, however, treating my adoration as childish. 'You must know my figure,' she said once, 'much better than I know it myself.'
'Naturally,' I replied, but even now in old age I am at a complete loss and utterly unable to express wherein the infinite attraction consisted.
This love of plastic beauty goes naturally with that adoration of virginity which led me to stray a hundred times in my life and is now as inexplicable to me as it was fifty years ago. Even now a well-made girl's legs of fourteen make the pulses beat in my forehead and bring water into my mouth. After Mrs. Mayhew when I was seventeen, no mature woman who had been enjoyed ever attracted me physically with this intensity. It was the young and untried and with the years the unripe that drew me irresistibly; and once at least a little later I gave myself to the pursuit for months in an orgy of lust.
But that's a story for my next volume and is intended to show what wealth can do. Now I can only say that Laura had won me body and mind and soul.
For the soul was the chiefest factor in the deathless fascination and it often humbled me. There's a sonnet, entitled White Heather, of an almost unknown poet of this time, one Ronald Macfie, that gives partial expression to this idolatry of love. Here is the sextet:
O Queen! and I answer the wind in gentle wise, Saying that I have chosen as embassy This passionless heather, thinking it may devise Some white, soft suppliant way towards my plea To tell how earth is hallowed by thine eyes, How life grows holier in loving thee.
Laura often found words that affected me like these verses. After enjoying her one golden afternoon and kissing her from mouth to knees, she suddenly took my head in her hands and said to me with a sort of childish gravity, 'Set tutto il mio ben.'
I've had better bedfellows, mistresses more given to the art of love and far more proficient in arousing maddening sensations, but my instinct on the whole was justified: I loved Laura better than anyone I knew up to that time or for many a year afterwards; esteemed her, too, as more intelligent; and I still think her figure the most beautiful I've ever seen.
It was her mutism that was the barrier between us always, but at long last the heart-talk had to take place. One day she asked me, 'If you got a letter reflecting on me, should you mind?'
'What sort of letter?' I asked, and after much probing she confessed it might be a letter of hers that showed 'affection-for some one else!'
'Passion, you mean?' I asked.
'Not passion,' she replied.
'You may as well tell me everything,' I urged, 'because the letter, however outspoken, will only confirm my suspicions. I know you were in love with that American and you gave yourself to him. I saw you together.'
'No, no!' she cried. 'Never as I have to you, never!'
My jealous rage wouldn't take it. 'Nonsense!' I cried. 'I saw him in the Savoy once put his hand on your bare neck; that's what kept me away from you after the year was up.'
Her eyes grew large. 'At the Savoy?' she cried. 'Mother was with me.'
'Yes,' I went on pitilessly, 'but he was with you often when your mother wasn't there. Why can't you tell the truth? That's the thing that separates us: I can forgive, but you can't be honest! Why not say at once he had you dozens of times. I know more than that.'
'Sometimes I think you hate me,' she said in a low voice, mournfully. 'It's not true: I've never given myself to sex-pleasures as I have with you- never, Frank. You must know that, dear!'
But I was inexorable: I would get the whole truth at last. 'Why, you got in the family way with him,' I cried, 'and he gave you or you took medicine and brought about a miscarriage.'
'Oh, oh!' she cried, covering her face with her hands. 'You could think that.
You're wicked, wicked; that's not love,' and she flamed upright before me,
'nor the truth.' I smiled.
'It isn't the truth,' she persisted. 'I never had a miscarriage as you say.
Disgusting!'
'Call it what you will,' I cried. 'Your blotched lips showed me you had womb-trouble and inflammation, and
