Beyond the general principles which I have indicated I had no clear idea of what I was going to do, but I had got new clothes, no debts, and about seventy-five pounds in cash. I think I was well educated, though rather in a general and erratic way. My father, who had never been in France in his life, spoke the most idiomatic, and even the most argotic, French, with the vilest of accents. He infinitely preferred French fiction to English, and I will do him the justice to say that he generally remembered to look it up. It is possible that, with my knowledge of French, music and literature, I might have become a governess, but to become a governess is to walk deliberately into the cul-de-sac. I had vague ideas that I should like to get into some kind of business, and by cleverness, and practicality, and temperance, and early rising, and the rest of the bag-of-tricks, worm my way slowly upwards until I was a manageress and indispensable. All the time I should be saving money, and should then be ready to start for myself. I had not decided what the business was to be; once in London I should have time to look about me.
I had also thought of marriage. Even if I had not thought of it, the fact that the doctor proposed to me twice would have reminded me of it. I was pretty enough, and though the idea of falling in love never occurred to me, I thought that I might marry rather well one day. That was an additional reason for leaving Castel-on-Weld. I had already twice refused the only marriageable man in the neighbourhood. But in any case I was only eighteen and I did not mean to marry for some time to come.
I was going to play a lone hand, and the honest truth is that I rather enjoyed the prospect. I was going to London, a place where things happen, and I was going to do what I wanted in the way I wanted. And perhaps I should starve, and perhaps I should have fun. So one morning I got into a third-class railway carriage, and an old woman talked to me at length about her somewhat unseemly physical infirmities. I hope I was sympathetic, but my mind was already in London, looking out for the possibility of adventure.
I did not have to wait long in London to discover that strange things happen there. The first thing that I noticed on my arrival at Charing Cross was that on the platform, under the clock, there were some fifteen girls, all of whom wore the closest possible physical resemblance to myself. We might all have been sisters.
II
MR. NATHAN GOULD
It was something of a surprise.
If on my arrival in London I had found waiting on the platform at Charing Cross one girl of the same height as myself, the same colour of hair, the same type of face, and the same style of clothes, I might have thought it merely a coincidence. But here were fifteen girls, all, so far as I could see, exactly similar. They were not in groups, but scattered about the platform under the clock. They never spoke to one another, but it struck me that they looked at one another curiously and with something like veiled hostility. I saw the same expression on their faces whenever one of them happened to pass me. I could not imagine what it meant, and I wanted to find out. I sent a porter to the cloak-room with my belongings, and stood against the bookstall waiting events. It was then two minutes to one.
At one o’clock precisely a man of about thirty-five, in a light overcoat, with a folded newspaper in his hand, walked rapidly into the station and stood still, looking about him. His personal appearance was not in his favour. He wore too much jewellery, and the expression on his face was one of furtive spite. One of the girls who were waiting walked close past him very slowly. He looked at her intently, but made no sign, and she then passed out of the station. A second girl did the same thing, except that she lingered at a little distance from him. A third was just approaching, when he came rapidly forward to me and raised his hat.
“I think,” he said, in a slightly foreign accent, “I am right in presuming that you are here in response to my advertisement in this morning’s Mail.”