Miss Allen had not been in Mrs. Porter's service for very long. Wearied with the exactions of a family of children whose idle and uninspiring intelligences she was attempting to governess, she answered, at the end of 1918, an advertisement in the "Agony" column of The Times, that led her to Mrs. Porter. She loved Mrs. Porter at first sight.
"Why, she's a dear old lady," she exclaimed to her ironic spirit—"dear old ladies" being in those days as rare as crinolines. She was of the kind for which Miss Allen had unconsciously been looking: generous, gentle, refined, and intelligent. Moreover, she had, within the last six months, been left quite alone in the world—Mr. Porter had died of apoplexy in August, 1918. He had left her very wealthy, and Miss Allen discovered quickly in the old lady a rather surprising desire to see and enjoy life—surprising, because old ladies of seventy-one years of age and of Mrs. Porter's gentle appearance do not, as a rule, care for noise and bustle and the buzz of youthful energy.
"I want to be in the very middle of things, dear Miss Allen," said Mrs. Porter, "right in the very middle. We lived at Wimbledon long enough, Henry and I—it wasn't good for either of us. Find me somewhere within two minutes of all the best theatres."
Miss Allen found Hortons, which is, as everyone knows, in Duke Street, just behind Piccadilly and Fortnum and Mason's, and Hatchard's and the Hammam Turkish Baths and the Royal Academy and Scott's hat-shop and Jackson's Jams—how could you be more perfectly in the centre of London?
Then Miss Allen discovered a curious thing—namely, that Mrs. Porter did not wish to keep a single piece, fragment, or vestige of her Wimbledon effects. She insisted on an auction—everything was sold. Miss Allen attempted a remonstrance—some of the things in the Wimbledon house were very fine, handsome, solid mid-Victorian sideboards and cupboards, and chairs and tables.
"You really have no idea, Mrs. Porter," said Miss Allen, "of the cost of furniture these days. It is quite terrible; you will naturally get a wonderful price for your things, but the difficulty of buying——"
Mrs. Porter was determined. She nodded her bright bird-like head, tapped with her delicate fingers on the table and smiled at Miss Allen.
"If you don't mind, dear. I know it's tiresome for you, but I have my reasons." It was not tiresome at all for Miss Allen; she loved to buy pretty new things at someone else's expense, but it was now, for the first time, that she began to wonder how dearly Mrs. Porter had loved her husband.
Through the following weeks this became her principal preoccupation—Mr. Henry Porter. She could not have explained to herself why this was. She was not, by nature, an inquisitive and scandal-loving woman, nor was she unusually imaginative. People did not, as a rule, occur to her as existing unless she saw them physically there in front of her. Nevertheless she spent a good deal of her time in considering Mr. Porter.
She was able to make the Horton flat very agreeable. Mrs. Porter wanted "life and colour," so the sitting-room had curtains with pink roses and a bright yellow cage with two canaries, and several pretty water-colours, and a handsome fire-screen with golden peacocks, and a deep Turkish carpet, soft and luxurious to the feet. Not one thing from the Wimbledon house was there, not any single picture of Mr. Porter. The next thing that Miss Allen discovered was that Mrs. Porter was nervous.