“Do you mind if I smoke?” Anthony asked, producing his pipe.
“Of course not. In fact I rather feel I need a cigarette myself. No, don’t you bother!” she added quickly, as Anthony felt in his pockets. “I’ve got some of my own particular brand here, and I hardly ever smoke anything else.”
She produced a cigarette-case from her bag, and Anthony held a match for her, lighting his own pipe from it afterward. She drew one or two deep inhalations and sighed contentedly.
“Well, about myself; there’s really very little to tell you. Four months ago I was in London, broke to the wide—as I had been off and on for the last seven years. My father was an officer in the regular army; he was killed in France in 1917, when I was fifteen years old. I inherited about two hundred pounds from him and, of course, a pension; the pension was just enough to keep body and soul together if one lived on rice and cold water, but not much more.” She paused for a moment as if in thought.
“Unfortunately,” she went on with a touch of cynicism, “it appears that my father had ‘married beneath him.’ I don’t remember my mother at all (she died when I was a baby), but I believe that she was the daughter of a fraudulent bucket-shop proprietor in Liverpool who had served two terms of imprisonment and my father was more or less entrapped into marriage with her when he was a young subaltern. He never hinted a word of all this to me, by the way; don’t think that. He was a dear. But it’s been rubbed into me pretty thoroughly since by other charming people.”
“I say,” Anthony put in in acute distress, “please don’t tell me anything you’d rather not. I mean⸺!”
“Why not?” asked the girl in a hard voice. “Why shouldn’t I tell you everything? That police inspector seems to know all about it. Probably it will be in all the papers to-morrow.”
“But⸺” Anthony shifted his position and relapsed into uncomfortable silence.
“Well, the consequence was that my father had been cut off by his family. They wouldn’t have anything more to do with him. Nor would they with me. One of his brothers sent five hundred pounds to daddy’s solicitors to provide for my education and keep me till I was old enough to earn my own living, but that was as far as any of them would go. I’m not complaining; in the circumstances it was remarkably generous of him. That money, with my own two hundred, kept me till I was eighteen, after that I had to earn my own living. You’ve probably heard that girls had some difficulty in getting jobs after the war. It’s perfectly true. I was trained as a shorthand-typist, but unfortunately nobody seemed to want a shorthand-typist. But I got work all right. I had to. During the last three years I’ve been a governess, a shop-assistant, a waitress and a parlour-maid.”
“Good God!” Anthony breathed.