The Point of View

The Point of View

The Project Gutenberg EBook of The Point of View, by Elinor Glyn
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Title: The Point of View
Author: Elinor Glyn
Release Date: March, 2004 [EBook #5310] [Yes, we are more than one
year ahead of schedule] [This file was first posted on June 29, 2002]
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The Author's Press Series of the Works of Elinor Glyn
THE POINT OF VIEW
ELINOR GLYN

CHAPTER I
The restaurant of the Grand Hotel in Rome was filling up. People were
dining rather late--it was the end of May and the entertainments were
lessening, so they could dawdle over their repasts and smoke their
cigarettes in peace.
Stella Rawson came in with her uncle and aunt, Canon and the
Honorable Mrs. Ebley, and they took their seats in a secluded corner.
They looked a little out of place--and felt it--amid this more or less gay
company. But the drains of the Grand Hotel were known to be beyond
question, and, coming to Rome so late in the season, the Reverend
Canon Ebley felt it was wiser to risk the contamination of the
over-worldly-minded than a possible attack of typhoid fever. The belief
in a divine protection did not give him or his lady wife that serenity it
might have done, and they traveled fearfully, taking with them their
own jaeger sheets among other precautions.
They realized they must put up with the restaurant for meals, but at
least the women folk should not pander to the customs of the place and
wear evening dress. Their subdued black gowns were fastened to the
throat. Stella Rawson felt absolutely excited--she was twenty-one years
old, but this was the first time she had ever dined in a fashionable
restaurant, and it almost seemed like something deliciously wrong.

Life in the Cathedral Close where they lived in England was not highly
exhilarating, and when its duties were over it contained only mild
gossip and endless tea-parties and garden-parties by way of recreation.
Canon and the Honorable Mrs. Ebley were fairly rich people. The
Uncle Erasmus' call to the church had been answered from
inclination--not necessity. His heart was in his work. He was a good
man and did his duty according to the width of the lights in which he
had been brought up.
Mrs. Ebley did more than her duty--and had often too much momentum,
which now and then upset other people's apple carts.
She had, in fact, been the moving spirit in the bringing about of her
niece Stella's engagement to the Bishop's junior chaplain, a young
gentleman of aesthetic aspirations and eight hundred a year of his own.
Stella herself had never been enthusiastic about the affair. As a man,
Eustace Medlicott said absolutely nothing at all to her-- though to be
sure she was quite unaware that he was inadequate in this respect. No
man had meant anything different up to this period of her life. She had
seen so few of them she was no judge.
Eustace Medlicott had higher collars than the other curates, and intoned
in a wonderfully melodious voice in the cathedral. And quite a number
of the young ladies of Exminster, including the Bishop's second
daughter, had been setting their caps at him from the moment of his
arrival, so that when, by the maneuvers of Aunt Caroline Ebley, Stella
found him proposing to her, she somehow allowed herself to murmur
some sort of consent.
Then it seemed quite stimulating to have a ring and to be congratulated
upon being engaged. And the few weeks that followed while the thing
was fresh and new had passed quite pleasantly. It was only when about
a month had gone by that a gradual and growing weariness seemed to
be falling upon her.
To