Studies in Wives

by Marie Belloc Lowndes

The young man looked round. Every bench was full, but there were plenty of empty chairs. He dragged one of them forward, and placed it with its back to a large tree. From there he could see everyone who came in and out of the gate, and so he and Fanny would not lose a moment looking for one another. But, though many went out, very few came in; the Park was beginning to empty.

Suddenly two middle-aged women, the one very stout, the other very thin, walked slowly through the gate. They struck across Germaine's line of vision, and for a moment his dark eyes rested on them indifferently. Then his gaze changed into something like attention, for he had a vague impression of having seen the elder of these two women before. What was more, he felt certain he had seen her in some vaguely unpleasant connection.

For a moment he believed her to be one of the cook-housekeepers with whom he and Bella had grappled during the earlier days of their married life. But no, this short stout woman with the shrewd, powerful face Germaine seemed to know, did not look like a servant. Even he could see that her black clothes were handsome and costly, if rather too warm for a fine July day. Her thin, nervous-looking companion was also dressed with some pretension and research, but she lacked the other's look of stout prosperity.

They were typical Londoners, of the kind to be seen on the route of every Royal procession, and standing among the crowd outside the church door at every fashionable marriage—women who, if they had lived in the London of the Georges, would have walked a good many miles to see a fellow-creature swing. But to Oliver Germaine they were simply a couple of unattractive-looking women, one of whom he thought he had seen before, and whose proximity was faintly disagreeable.

Germaine's mind had dwelt on them longer than it would otherwise have done because, when just in front of him, they stopped short and hesitated; then, looking round them much as Germaine himself had looked round a few minutes before, and, the elder woman taking the lead, each dragged a chair forward, and sat down a yard or so to the young man's right, the trunk of the tree stretching its gnarled grey girth between.

Seven minutes of the ten Oliver meant to allow Fanny had now gone by, and he felt inclined to cut the other three minutes short, and go straight home. After all, it was too bad of her to be so unpunctual!

And then, striking on his ear, shreds of the conversation which was taking place between the two women sitting near him began to penetrate Oliver Germaine's brain. Names fell on his ear—Christian names, surnames, with which he was familiar, evoking the personalities of men and women with whom he was on terms of acquaintance, in some cases of close friendship.

Unconsciously his clasped hands tightened on the knob of his stick, and he caught himself listening—listening with a queer mixture of morbid interest and growing disgust.

It was the elder woman who spoke the most, and she was a good speaker, with that trick,—self-taught, instinctive,—of making the people of whom she was speaking leap up before the listener. Now and again she was interrupted by little shrieks of astonishment and horror—her companion's way of paying tribute to the interesting nature of the conversation.

How on earth—so Oliver Germaine asked himself with heating cheek—had the woman obtained her peculiarly intimate knowledge of those of whom she was speaking? The people, these men and women, especially women, whose lives, the inner cores of whose existences, were being probed and ruthlessly exposed, almost all belonged to the Germaines' own particular set,—if indeed such a prosperous and popular couple as were Oliver and Bella, could be said to have a particular set in that delightful world into which they had only comparatively lately effected an entrance, and of which the strands all intermingle the one with the other.