Still "minding" so dreadfully about Muriel Elvey and Harry?
Why be surprised because men fell like ninepins before her expensively-shod feet? Yet I was astonished. Not at Harry. At that other man for whom she was "the" girl—or so I'd convinced myself.
Surely, though, Captain Holiday should have been the exception to the rule that men adore the Muriel type?
Yes; I'd made up mental pictures of this girl of whom he'd talked without mentioning her name.
To think that the girl he wanted could be a Muriel!
She was the girl of whom one couldn't think without setting her in the background of restaurant-lights, hothouse flowers and Bond Street dressmakers.
When one saw Muriel, one saw always her "things": Muriel and her pearl-string; Muriel and her gold-mesh purse with tiny powder-box and lip-stick attached; Muriel and her mauve leather dressing-case; Muriel and her ivory manicure-set.
Each was a lure, each was a mesh of the net for a man like my lost admirer Harry.... His people were now exceedingly well-off, but there had been no luxury in his boyhood, which, as he'd told me, had been passed in a bleak little house behind the shop where the money had been made, penny by penny, to give him his chance.
At twenty-five, luxury was still rather a new delight to him. He could not take it for granted, poor darling; he who had never seen his mother with any "pretty" things of her own. Hence the reaction. He loved a woman to have "possessions." He adored her to "fuss" incessantly about her nails and skin and hair.
But Captain Holiday, I thought, liked such different things!