Page:The Strand Magazine (Volume 42).djvu/748

Armitage? Stay—before you speak I ought to tell you that what you say will in all probability be repeated to him; and while I'm about it I ought, perhaps, to tell you something else—and that is not a very easy something to say."

She sipped at her glass; then she took a cigarette out of a gold case and began to smoke. I thought what an extremely unprepossessing person she seemed. I wondered

by what process of evolution w sweet. simple, fresh. clean young girl had become transformed into such a being. Rather to my surprise, and a good deal to my confusion, she showed an unexpected capacity to read my thoughts.

"You don't think I'm very much to look at, do you? I'm not; I never was. Time has not improved me, either outside or in. When I was young I was very poor. For seven years I was a governess at sometimes twenty, sometimes thirty pounds a year, and lived upon my earnings—if you know what that means. I couldn't expect to get married on that, could I? And no one wanted me anyhow, though I wanted to marry very badly. I never remember the time when the one thing of which I dreamed was not to become some decent man's wife. It sounds funny, doesn't it? Isn't it a shocking confession to make? I wonder how many women would make it they told the truth?"

She flicked the ash from her cigarette. I was beginning to wish that I had left her alone, that I had not embraced an opportunity of doing her good.

"When I was about thirty-eight I came into a lot of money from an uncle. whom I don't remember to have ever seen. It turned my head; I thought that money could do anything. I decided that now I would marry, and that I would marry just the sort of man I had always hoped I would do. You see, I had practically no knowledge of the world at all —how can a woman have who has lived a life like mine? It took seven or eight years to make it clear to me that, in thinking because I had got money I could marry the sort of man I wanted to, I was a fool."

She smiled, and the whole of her face seemed to be dislocated to enable her to do so, and she beckoned the waiter to fill her glass.

"Men wanted to marry me—oh, yes; but they were the kind o men whom I would not, as the saying is, have touched with the end of a barge-pole. I sent them about their business. Whenever I saw a masculine creature to whose appearance I particularly objected, I knew that, sooner or later, he would ask me to be his wife—which was nice.