Glasses | Page 5

insisting on her making me
acquainted with Flora Saunt; indeed I took the bull by the horns, urging
that she had drawn the portrait of a nature which common charity now
demanded of her to put into relation with a character really fine. Such a
frail creature was just an object of pity. This contention on my part had
at first of course been jocular; but strange to say it was quite the ground
I found myself taking with regard to our young lady after I had begun
to know her. I couldn't have said what I felt about her except that she
was undefended; from the first of my sitting with her there after dinner,
under the stars--that was a week at Folkestone of balmy nights and
muffled tides and crowded chairs--I became aware both that protection
was wholly absent from her life and that she was wholly indifferent to
its absence. The odd thing was that she was not appealing: she was
abjectly, divinely conceited, absurdly fantastically pleased. Her beauty
was as yet all the world to her, a world she had plenty to do to live in.
Mrs. Meldrum told me more about her, and there was nothing that, as
the centre of a group of giggling, nudging spectators, Flora wasn't
ready to tell about herself. She held her little court in the crowd, upon
the grass, playing her light over Jews and Gentiles, completely at ease
in all promiscuities. It was an effect of these things that from the very
first, with every one listening, I could mention that my main business

with her would be just to have a go at her head and to arrange in that
view for an early sitting. It would have been as impossible, I think, to
be impertinent to her as it would have been to throw a stone at a
plate-glass window; so any talk that went forward on the basis of her
loveliness was the most natural thing in the world and immediately
became the most general and sociable. It was when I saw all this that I
judged how, though it was the last thing she asked for, what one would
ever most have at her service was a curious compassion. That sentiment
was coloured by the vision of the dire exposure of a being whom vanity
had put so off her guard. Hers was the only vanity I have ever known
that made its possessor superlatively soft. Mrs. Meldrum's further
information contributed moreover to these indulgences--her account of
the girl's neglected childhood and queer continental relegations, with
straying squabbling Monte-Carlo-haunting parents; the more invidious
picture, above all, of her pecuniary arrangement, still in force, with the
Hammond Synges, who really, though they never took her
out--practically she went out alone--had their hands half the time in her
pocket. She had to pay for everything, down to her share of the
wine-bills and the horses' fodder, down to Bertie Hammond Synge's
fare in the "underground" when he went to the City for her. She had
been left with just money enough to turn her head; and it hadn't even
been put in trust, nothing prudent or proper had been done with it. She
could spend her capital, and at the rate she was going, expensive,
extravagant and with a swarm of parasites to help, it certainly wouldn't
last very long.
"Couldn't YOU perhaps take her, independent, unencumbered as you
are?" I asked of Mrs. Meldrum. "You're probably, with one exception,
the sanest person she knows, and you at least wouldn't scandalously
fleece her."
"How do you know what I wouldn't do?" my humorous friend
demanded. "Of course I've thought how I can help her--it has kept me
awake at night. But doing it's impossible; she'll take nothing from me.
You know what she does--she hugs me and runs away. She has an
instinct about me and feels that I've one about her. And then she
dislikes me for another reason that I'm not quite clear about, but that

I'm well aware of and that I shall find out some day. So far as her
settling with me goes it would be impossible moreover here; she wants
naturally enough a much wider field. She must live in London--her
game is there. So she takes the line of adoring me, of saying she can
never forget that I was devoted to her mother--which I wouldn't for the
world have been--and of giving me a wide berth. I think she positively
dislikes to look at me. It's all right; there's no obligation; though people
in general can't take their eyes off me."
"I see that at this moment," I replied. "But what does it matter where or
how, for the present, she lives? She'll marry infallibly, marry early, and
everything then