She was right. It had been lavishly paragraphed, with photograph inset. Her flair for publicity is unerring.
“Darlings, how I loathe the Press—if I could only tell you! But the other part of the affair was so utterly wonderful, that it’s swamped everything else. It was like a revelation.
“You know how essentially super-civilised I am? A man once wrote a poem about my being like a piece of jade—hard, and brilliant, and polished, and yet with the unfathomable subtlety and agelessness of the East. My civilisation is partly temperamental, I suppose, and of course to a certain extent the result of elaborate education—and then hereditary as well. Look at Anthony. Could anyone have a more utterly civilised parent, I ask you? Elma is less poised, of course, but mercifully for me I’ve managed to inherit my mother’s physique and my father’s mentality. Like a sensitised plate, isn’t it? It does mean isolation of soul, and those terrible nerve-storms of mine, but in my heart of hearts I know it’s worth it.
“Only people are so ghastly. My friends have to rescue me.... You remember what it was like, Torry, the night that woman assaulted me at the Embassy, and talked, and talked, and talked. O Christ! it was all about food, or flannel, or babies—something too utterly indecent, I know. I sat there, helpless, martyred—and darling Torry came and rescued me. I shall never forget it, Torry, you sweet, never.
“Now this is what happened the other day. (Why do you allow me to be discursive, dear people?) You know my car was held up by Sinn Feiners? I, who adore everything lawless! But it was simply for being Anthony’s daughter, of course. They hate him so.
“You know how I drive for miles and miles, entirely alone, just so as to feel the air in my face, and my hands—rather small, really, by comparison—controlling that great swift machine. Well, I’d got to such a lonely place that it was like finding God—when suddenly these men appeared.
“I wasn’t a bit frightened—I never am frightened—but it was horrible, all the same. And I kept thinking of the people who’d be so sorry if I were killed, and wondering who’d be the sorriest, and who’d remember longest.”
(She looked round the room, her dark brows raised in an expression part whimsical, part pathetic.)
“All this isn’t the adventure, you know, though they took my jewels, and tied me up to a bench on a sort of heath place. They tied me here, and here.”
She held out a slim ankle, and extended both wrists.