The Pretty Lady | Page 3

flat to the curtained window of the
sitting-room. All the lights were softened by paper shades of a peculiar
hot tint between Indian red and carmine, giving a rich, romantic effect
to the gleaming pale enamelled furniture, and to the voluptuous
engravings after Sir Frederick Leighton, and the sweet, sentimental
engravings after Marcus Stone, and to the assorted knicknacks. The flat
had homogeneity, for everything in it, except the stove, had been
bought at one shop in Tottenham Court Road by a landlord who knew
his business. The stove, which was large, stood in the bedroom
fireplace, and thence radiated celestial comfort and security throughout
the home; the stove was the divinity of the home and Christine the
priestess; she had herself bought the stove, and she understood its
personality--it was one of your finite gods.
"Will you take something?" she asked, the hostess.
Whisky and a siphon and glasses were on the sideboard.
"Oh no, thanks!"

"Not even a cigarette?" Holding out the box and looking up at him, she
appealed with a long, anxious glance that he should honour her
cigarettes.
"Thank you!" he said. "I should like a cigarette very much."
She lit a match for him.
"But you--do you not smoke?"
"Yes. Sometimes."
"Try one of mine--for a change."
He produced a long, thin gold cigarette-case, stuffed with cigarettes.
She lit a cigarette from his.
"Oh!" she cried after a few violent puffs. "I like enormously your
cigarettes. Where are they to be found?"
"Look!" said he. "I will put these few in your box." And he poured
twenty cigarettes into an empty compartment of the box, which was
divided into two.
"Not all!" she protested.
"Yes."
"But I say NO!" she insisted with a gesture suddenly firm, and put a
single cigarette back into his case and shut the case with a snap, and
herself returned it to his pocket. "One ought never to be without a
cigarette."
He said:
"You understand life.... How nice it is here!" He looked about and then
sighed.

"But why do you sigh?"
"Sigh of content! I was just thinking this place would be something else
if an English girl had it. It is curious, lamentable, that English girls
understand nothing--certainly not love."
"As for that, I've always heard so."
"They understand nothing. Not even warmth. One is cold in their
rooms."
"As for that--I mean warmth--one may say that I understand it; I do."
"You understand more than warmth. What is your name?"
"Christine."
She was the accidental daughter of a daughter of joy. The mother, as
frequently happens in these cases, dreamed of perfect respectability for
her child and kept Christine in the country far away in Paris, meaning
to provide a good dowry in due course. At forty-two she had not got the
dowry together, nor even begun to get it together, and she was ill.
Feckless, dilatory and extravagant, she saw as in a vision her own
shortcomings and how they might involve disaster for Christine.
Christine, she perceived, was a girl imperfectly educated--for in the
affair of Christine's education the mother had not aimed high
enough--indolent, but economical, affectionate, and with a very great
deal of temperament. Actuated by deep maternal solicitude, she brought
her daughter back to Paris, and had her inducted into the profession
under the most decent auspices. At nineteen Christine's second
education was complete. Most of it the mother had left to others, from a
sense of propriety. But she herself had instructed Christine concerning
the five great plagues of the profession. And also she had adjured her
never to drink alcohol save professionally, never to invest in anything
save bonds of the City of Paris, never to seek celebrity, which
according to the mother meant ultimate ruin, never to mix intimately
with other women. She had expounded the great theory that generosity
towards men in small things is always repaid by generosity in big

things--and if it is not the loss is so slight! And she taught her the
fundamental differences between nationalities. With a Russian you had
to eat, drink and listen. With a German you had to flatter, and yet
adroitly insert, "Do not imagine that I am here for the fun of the thing."
With an Italian you must begin with finance. With a Frenchman you
must discuss finance before it is too late. With an Englishman you must
talk, for he will not, but in no circumstances touch finance until he has
mentioned it. In each case there was a risk, but the risk should be faced.
The course of instruction finished, Christine's mother had died with a
clear conscience and a mind consoled.
Said Christine, conversational, putting the question that lips seemed
then to articulate of themselves in obedience to its imperious demand
for utterance:
"How long