In reality she was Beatrice Veronica Law Leslie.
A mouthful indeed! You can make as many combinations with that as with the trick lock of a safe, and it will be as difficult to pick the secret. She had a strong superstition about keeping to her own initials, anagrammed or reversed and twisted. It seemed to her that this was part of a bond of honour of which another held the pledge. With this pen-name a most astonishing thing had befallen Beatrice Veronica Law Leslie, for she won a literary success so sudden and singular that the very management of it required a statesmanship she never before knew she possessed.
A little must here be said of her life that this strange thing may be understood. She was the only child of a well-known Oxford don and a somewhat remarkable mystically-minded mother who died when the girl was fourteen. Her father, after that loss, “tried life a little, liked it not, and died” four years later, and Beatrice Veronica who was known in her family as B. V. then betook herself to the guardianship of an aunt in Montreal. Here, she also tried life a little, on the society side, and certainly liked it not. There was an urge within her that cried aloud for adventure, for the sight of the dissolving glories of the Orient and contact with strange lives that called to her dumbly in books. They peeped and mocked and vanished to their unknown countries taking her longing with them, and life lay about her vapid, flat, dominated by an Aunt of Fashion.
She floated on a duck pond and sighed for the ocean. What is a young woman of spirit, not too beautiful to be dangerous, of small but sufficient means, to do in such a case? Beatrice Veronica knew very well.
She waited until she was twenty-one, meanwhile securing the allegiance of a girl, Sidney Verrier, in like case, an enthusiast like herself, and on a May morning of dreamy sweetness they got themselves into a C.P.R. train for Victoria, B. C., leaving two ill-auguring aunts on the platform, and away with them on a trip to the Orient via Japan. They were under bond to return in a year.
It was a wonderful, a heavenly experience—that wander-year of theirs. The things they saw, the men and women they met, the marvels which appealed to every sense! But I must not dwell on these for they are but the pedestal to the story of V. Lydiat.
A year! Impossible. Four, six, eight years went by and still unheeded aunts clamoured, and the pavements of Montreal lacked their footsteps.
And then, in Agra, Sidney Verrier married, and apologetically, doubtfully, dissolved the fair companionship, and Beatrice Veronica was left to solitude.
When the bridal car rolled off to the station and the honeymoon at Mussoori, she sat down and considered. She had not realized it until then. The ways of the world were open, for experience had made them plain. She had acquaintances, go where she would. There was no material reason why she should not continue this delightful nomad existence delightfully. But she was lonely, and suddenly it became clear to her that she wanted quiet, time, recollection. She had assisted at a great feast of the senses and had eaten to satiety.
Now—imperatively—something in her heart cried “Enough.”