Miss Keating purred under the caress. She held up her hand to Kitty who took it and gave it a squeeze before she let it go.
"Poor Bunny. Nice Bunny," she said (as if Miss Keating were an animal). She stretched out her arms, turned, and disappeared through the lounge into the billiard-room.
CHAPTER III
IT could not be denied that Kitty had a charm. Miss Keating was not denying it, even now, when she was saying to herself that Kitty had a way of attracting very disagreeable attention.
At first she had supposed that this was an effect of Kitty's charm, disagreeable to Kitty. Then, even in the beginning, she had seen that there was something deliberate and perpetual in Kitty's challenge of the public eye. The public eye, so far from pursuing Kitty, was itself pursued, tracked down and captured. Kitty couldn't let it go. Publicity was what Kitty coveted.
She had then supposed that Kitty was used to it; that she was, in some mysterious way, a personage. There would be temptations, she had imagined, for any one who had a charm that lived thus in the public eye.
And Kitty had her good points, too. There was nobody so easy to live with as Kitty in her private capacity, if she could be said to have one. She never wanted to be amused, or read to, or sat up with late at night, like the opulent invalids Miss Keating had been with hitherto. Miss Keating owed everything she had to Kitty, her health (she was constitutionally anæmic), her magnificent salary, the luxurious gaiety in which they lived and moved (moved, perhaps, rather more than lived). The very combs in her hair were Kitty's. So were the gowns she wore on occasions of splendour and display. It struck her as odd that they were all public, these occasions, things they paid to go to.
It had dawned on her by this time, coldly, disagreeably, that Kitty Tailleur was nobody, nobody, that is to say, in particular. A person of no account in the places where they had stayed. In their three months' wanderings they had never been invited to any private house. Miss Keating could not account for that air of ill-defined celebrity that hung round Kitty like a scent, and marked her trail.
Not that any social slur seemed to attach to Kitty. The acquaintances she had made in her brief and curious fashion were all, or nearly all, socially immaculate. The friends (they were all men) who came to her of their own intimate accord, belonged, some of them, to an aristocracy higher than that represented by Mr. Lucy or the Colonel. And they had been by no means impervious to Kitty's charm.