"Will you leave your bedroom door unlocked, or won't you?"
She said:
"If that man would throw his handkerchief to me, I would follow him round the world in my shift! . . . Look here . . . see me shake when I think of it. . . ." She held out her hand at the end of her long arm: hand and arm trembled together, minutely, then very much. . . . "Well," she finished, "if you see that and still want to come to my room . . . your blood be on your own head. . . ." She paused for a breath or two and then said:
"You can come. . . . I won't lock my door. . . . But I don't say that you'll get anything . . . or that you'll like what you get . . . That's a fair tip. . . ." She added suddenly: "You sale fat . . . take what you get and be damned to you! . . ."
Major Perowne had suddenly taken to twirling his moustaches; he said:
"Oh, I'll chance the A.P.M.'s. . . ."
She suddenly coiled her legs into her chair.
"I know now what I came here for," she said.
Major Wilfrid Fosbrooke Eddicker Perowne of Perowne, the son of his mother, was one of those individuals who have no history, no strong proclivities, nothing, his knowledge seemed to be bounded by the contents of his newspaper for the immediate day; at any rate, his conversation never went any farther. He was not bold, he was not shy: he was neither markedly courageous nor markedly cowardly. His mother was immoderately wealthy, owned an immense castle that hung over crags, above a western sea, much as a birdcage hangs from a window of a high tenement building, but she received few or no visitors, her cuisine being indifferent and her wine atrocious. She had strong temperance opinions and, immediately after the death of her husband, she had emptied the contents of his cellar, which were almost as historic as his castle, into the sea, a shudder going through county-family and no, or almost no, characteristics. He had done England. But even this was not enough to make Perowne himself notorious.
His mother allowed him—after an eyeopener in early youth—the income of a junior royalty, but he did nothing with it. He lived in a great house in Palace Gardens, Kensington, and he lived all alone with rather a large staff of servants who had been selected by his mother, but they did nothing at all, for he ate all his meals, and even took his bath and dressed for dinner at the Bath Club. He was otherwise parsimonious.