I am not going to advertise that hateful book of Mrs Bassett's. If I could have torn it in two as Rose had torn it I should have done so. She had hardly changed his name—for what was "Kendal Thorne" but Derwent Rose? So I will merely say that to old memories she had added new and malicious inventions, and had produced a ridiculous grotesque of a vain and peevish childhood, an impossibly blatant youth, and a culmination born of her own distorted imagination. It was for her, and not for himself, that he had blushed. For her sake he would have torn up every single copy of it if by that means it could never have been. He could have scolded her, shaken her, smacked her, ashamed, angry and helpless as one is before an ill-conditioned child who nevertheless has claims on one. That there could ever have been any passage between them her book put entirely out of the question. And so much for The Parthian Arrow.
At half-past three that afternoon I was at the Boltons, ringing Miss Oliphant's bell. A tiny maid admitted me, and I was shown into a sort of alcove with a good deal of tapestry and bric-à-brac and brass about, the sort of things the artists of half a generation ago affected for the sake of their "colour." Nor was the studio into which I was presently shown much different from a hundred other studios I had seen. These glass-roofed, indigo-blinded, north-lighted wells, I may say, always depress me, and had I to live in one of them I should instantly have a side-window cut, so that I might at least have a glimpse once in a while of somebody who passed in the outer world.
But somehow the place suited Miss Oliphant. Perhaps it was the north light. Artists choose the north light because it varies little, and there was something about her that didn't vary very much either. She came through a portière-hung door, and as she stood there for a moment, not surprised (for I had telephoned that I was coming), but with that familiarity and expectancy once more in her dark eyes, I was able to check this cool and composed impression of her with my former one of over-lustrous eyes in the pinky gloom of the shaded lamps of the dinner-table.
Her hair, like her eyes, was dark; but she had a habit rather than a style of dressing it. It was piled in a high mass over her white brow, quite neatly, but rather as if to have it out of the way and done with than as making the most of its rich glossy treasure. A dateless, but by no means inappropriate tea-gown of filmy grey with a gold thread somewhere in it showed her long harmonious lines of limb and allowed her breasts to be guessed at; and the ripeness of her shoulders set off her long and almost too slender neck. She had cool and beautiful hands, sleeved to the wrist; but the daylight added to her years. At our former meeting I should have said she was thirty-five. Now I saw that she could hardly be less than forty.
She took my hand for a moment, smiled, but without speaking, and began to busy herself at a Benares tray. She reinserted the plug of an electric kettle, which immediately broke into a purr. She listened for a moment with her ear at the kettle, and then suddenly filled the teapot. She spoke, once more smiling, through the little cloudlet of steam.
"Do sit down," she said, indicating a "property" curule chair. "Well, how's Derry? Have you seen him lately?"
I made a note of the name she too called him by, and said, Yes, I had seen him yesterday. "I'm sorry to say he seemed worried," I added.
"Oh? What's worrying him?" she asked, withdrawing the plug from the wall and popping a cosy over the pot. It was a French cosy, a dainty little porcelain Marie Antoinette, with a sac and a padded and filigreed petticoat, and I remember thinking that if Miss Oliphant ever went to fancy-dress dances the costume of her cosy would have suited her very well.
"Have you read that horrible woman's horrible book?" I asked her point-blank.
"The Parthian Arrow? Yes, I've read it," she said equably.