“She never is, you know,” complained Mrs. Oden. Now that was a loquacious lady. I do not wish to be belittling any one else, but I am sure that she talked more in the next few minutes than any other person of the same chest-expansion in England. She seemed to have been suffering from silence all that morning until my ring. I learnt later that Mrs. Oden had once been Iris’s governess, that there was always a floor reserved for Iris in her house in Montpellier Square, which house Mr. and Mrs. Oden owed entirely to Iris’s generosity.
“She went off to Paris the other day,” complained Mrs. Oden, “at a moment’s notice. Here to-day and gone to-morrow. It is too bad of her, when we never see anything of her. She is too vague, I always tell her. I suppose she had made some arrangement with you, Mr. er, has forgotten to put you off, and now you are disappointed?”
“Oh,” I said. “Yes, certainly.”
“Well, I expect her back any day, but how long she will stay this time I have not the faintest idea. Really it is too bad, she gets vaguer every year. And here has her aunt Lady Eve Chalice been wanting her address in Paris, and I have not the faintest idea of anything! What did you say the name was? Oh, yes, of course, I have it down. She will see it as soon as she returns, I promise you. Yes, yes. Good-bye, good-bye.”
It was five days later that there came to my hand a large box labelled from Edouard Apel et Cie., rue de la Paix, Paris and stamped “By Air.” Within the large box were several smaller flat boxes, and within these were reams upon reams of finest white notepaper, but good, manly stuff, stamped with my new address; and if that notepaper had its way I never would have another address, for there was enough in those small flat boxes to last a reasonably reticent man for all time. No note came with them. I searched. Then, across the top sheet of the third box that I opened, I found scrawled in pencil in an absurd, schoolgirl hand: “That one day you may write to me to say that you have forgiven me for the only dignity I have left: the dignity of the....”
I could not make out that last word for several days. It was scrawled right across the foot of the sheet, a long squiggle with one eye looking out from the middle of it which might have been an a. At last I thought it was “unaware.”
Much later Iris told me that it was “unaware.” She said: “I picked out the phrase from a book I was reading, and sent it to you like a flower.”
Chapter Three: FOR PURITY!
I
THE cavalier of low creatures dies hard; surviving even our gesture, he loiters dangerously in the tail of our eye, he awaits, with piratical calm, the final stroke; and only will he fade and be forever gone, despised, and distraught, before the face of him who bore the magic device For Purity, whose ghost was to be raised by Mr. Townshend over dinner on the twelfth night after the coming of the green hat. For, his wretched Liberal being at last retrieved from somewhere beneath the foot of the poll, that gentleman was again among us, saying “hm.”