“I have met many women,” Ivor said, “and I don’t know anything.”
“Listen,” she said again: and spoke impulsively, swiftly. “I’ve been with Aram Melekian since I was ten. I’m twenty-eight now—eighteen years in that wise old man’s care, for he was very wise, you know. I was a grubby little girl playing about in the Fulham Road, the daughter of a plumber’s foreman and the sister of a little boy who was even grubbier than me, when Aram saw me on his way to the studio of one of his protégées in Redcliffe Road. He saw me several times, he said, and was amazed at my beauty....” She smiled faintly. “I think he has been amazed at it ever since. And of course I’ve been only too pleased to be able to return, if only like that, a little of the great debt I owe him.”
“At first,” she said, “he was my guardian. He had arranged things with my father—who would never receive any help for himself, dear father is such an independent kind of plumber! And a great success he’s made of plumbing, too, he and my brother—Snagg & Son, of the Fulham Road. For my name was Pam Snagg, but Aram changed it to Pamela Star, saying it was more apt for me....”
“And indeed it is,” said Ivor.
“Yes, Aram had a flair,” she agreed. “And, though he was so bitter, he could make even plain things beautiful by understanding them. That’s surely very rare....”
“At first he was my guardian,” she repeated, “and then, when I was twenty, he was my lover. And then, after that, he was my friend. He was my lover for a year, and he said that that year was the great mistake of his life—the only mistake of his life, he said. For one day he cried—Aram cried, hard Aram!—and after that he was my friend. My great friend.... The great mistake of his life! Well, I don’t know. It’s easy to judge these things by morality, so easy that morality must be sometimes wrong. It’s too cocksure.... I’m glad to have been his mistress. I feel I would have been very—small and little, without that. You understand? It somehow balances one—the knowledge. And I’m sure you wouldn’t be here and I talking to you so frankly but that once upon a time I let Aram love me—oh, yes, it was just that, there’s no excuse for me at all except that I’m glad of it.”
“But surely that’s just enough!”
“Yes?” she asked softly; and he had a conscious moment of wondering what she was going to say. “And was it enough excuse, my friend, for him to leave all his property, every bit, to me, to do just as I liked with? Me, Pamela Star!”
“Well!...” said Ivor in amazement. It was amazing....
“Oh, but it was dreadful!” she suddenly cried.