I sat down before the desk, after I had loosed my hair—which is that very, very black, that is the Hibernian accompaniment to blue eyes—and had slipped my slippers on.
"You have put me to considerable trouble to-day, Lady Frances."
Her portrait was hanging there—a small, cabinet-sized picture, in a battered gold frame. Her lover had succeeded in making her face on canvas very beautiful—with the exaggerated beauty of eyes and mouth which all portraits of that period show. Her brow was fine and thoughtful, irradiating the face with intelligence, yet I never looked at her without having a feeling that I was infinitely wiser than she.
Isn't it queer that we have this feeling of superiority over the people in old portraits—just because they are dead and we are living? We open an ancient book of engravings, and say: "Poor little Mary Shelley! Simple little Jane Austen! Naughty little Nell Gwynne!"—There's only one pictured lady of my acquaintance who smiles down my latter-day wisdom as being a futile upstart thing. I can't pity her! Oh, no! Nor endure her either, for she's Mona Lisa!
I had always had this maternal protectiveness in my attitude toward Lady Frances Webb, and to-night it was so keen that I could have tucked her in bed and told her fairy tales to soothe away the trembling fright she must have endured all that day. Instead of doing this, however, I satisfied myself with reading some of the letters over again. Isn't it a pity that above every writing-desk devoted to inter-sex correspondence there is not a framed warning: "Beyond Platonic Friendship Lies—Alimony!"
Anyway, Lady Frances and James Christie tried the medium ground for a while. Over in a large pigeonhole, far away from the rest, was a packet of letters tied with a strong twine. They were the uninteresting ones, because they were muzzled. The handwriting was the same as that of the others—dainty, last-century chirography, as delicate and curling as a baby's pink fingers—but I never read them, for I don't care for muzzled things. Gossip about Lady Jersey—Marlborough House—the cold-blooded ire of William Lamb—all this held but little charm—compared with the other.
"Not you—not to-night," I decided, pushing them aside quickly. "I've got to have good pay for my pains of this day!"
I sought another compartment, where a batch huddled together—a carefully selected batch. They were as many, and as clinging in their contact with one another, as early kisses. I took up the first one.
"Dear Big Man"—it began.
"It has been weeks and weeks now since I have seen you! If it were not that you lived in that terrible London and I in this lonely country, I should be too proud to remind you of the time, for I should expect you to be the one to complain.