Miss Lestrange stood by watching him with incompetent agony. She had seen these things happen before to other people’s boys, and she had always known why. The mothers were silly, the boys were unlicked cubs--they had been spoilt from the first. Now she was not quite so sure. Perhaps such things happened just out of misfortune, unhappiness, blunders that must come, accidents of the type which are said to haunt families who live according to the best regulations.
Lines came into Miss Lestrange’s placid face, she lost sleep, appetite, and repose. She woke with vague terrors, she was haunted by impotent fears. There was nothing to be done, and she hadn’t the strength to do nothing. Finally, the whole story focused on one notorious lady of musical comedy. The youth of London gave her desperate homage and adoration; she was old enough to be their mother; but they did not keep these gifts for their mothers, they gave them to Anastasia Falaise, and she accepted them with easy laughter.
Miss Lestrange wrote to her brother, and her brother replied heartlessly that it was “all right.”
Leslie went on worshipping at this popular shrine; he was continually absent from Mallows; if he was present he was silent when he wasn’t irritable. He never mentioned the lady’s name, but he wrote to her every day; she wrote to him sometimes, and vague ideas, resisted by common sense, prompted Miss Lestrange to tamper with their correspondence. This correspondence flourished even more conspicuously after the ineffective efforts of Leslie’s father. It was evident to Miss Lestrange that there was no help to be met in that quarter, so she attacked the citadel itself. With nervous incoherence she implored Leslie to come abroad, to give up this absurd infatuation. Leslie raised youth’s deadly standard of silence. He blocked her utterance with a gloomy stare.
Finally, he observed that he did not know what she meant, and left the room. Young men and even old ones are to be congratulated on this gift of absence; it is a very effective weapon. Leslie did not return for some time; when he did, Miss Lestrange said nothing further on the subject, for she had stayed in the room.
Finally, goaded to desperation, she committed an unprecedented error. She may, indeed, have been described as completely losing her head. She went to call one day by appointment on Anastasia Falaise.
Anastasia was staying in a famous London hotel. She had a charming sitting-room; it was littered with presentations, and she sat shaded by pink blinds with easy indolence in a large armchair.
Miss Lestrange’s first impression may be given as it flashed into her mind, “No woman of that type has any right to be so beautiful.” Anastasia showed neither youth nor years in her face; she might as easily have been thirty as fifty; she had no lines about her eyes and mouth or marring her low Greek forehead. Her wide-set dark eyes looked like some perennial mysterious spring of life. Her face and neck and hands were the color of warm ivory; her black hair was natural, but as nobody believed it, she would sometimes--to confirm it--let coil after coil fall to her knees. She had beauty as some men have genius, and she used it with more shrewdness and common sense than this other gift is often used. She had no particular wish to please Miss Lestrange, so she simply stared at her.
Miss Lestrange was vaguely uncomfortable; she felt that she was with an extraordinary person, and that she had lowered herself to the same level by doing an extraordinary thing. This was the kind of woman she knew how to snub; she did not know how to appeal to her.
“I think you know my nephew, Leslie Lestrange,” she began, blushing a little at her companion’s insolent, inanimate beauty.