CHAPTER I
Lady Sellingworth belonged to a great English family, and had been brought up in healthy splendour, saved from the canker of too much luxury by the aristocratic love of sport which is a tradition in such English families as hers. As a girl she had been what a certain sporting earl described as “a leggy beauty.” Even then she had shown a decided inclination to run wild and had seldom checked the inclination. Unusually tall and athletic, rather boyish in appearance, and of the thin, greyhound type, she had excelled in games and held her own in sports. She had shot in an era when comparatively few women shot, and in the hunting-field she had shown a reckless courage which had fascinated the hard-riding men who frequented her father’s house. As she grew older her beauty had rapidly developed, and with it an insatiable love of admiration. Early she had realized that she was going to be a beauty, and had privately thanked the gods for her luck. She could scarcely have borne not to be a beauty; but, mercifully, it was all right. Woman’s greatest gift was to be hers. When she looked into the glass and knew that, when she looked into men’s eyes and knew it even more definitely, she felt merciless and eternal. In the dawn no end was in sight; in the dawn no end seemed possible.
From the age of sixteen onwards hers was the intimate joy, certainly one of the greatest, if not the greatest of all the joys of women, of knowing that all men looked at her with pleasure, that many men looked at her with longing, that she was incessantly desired.
From the time when she was sixteen she lived perpetually in that atmosphere which men throw round a daring and beautiful woman without even conscious intention, creating it irresistibly merely by their natural desire. And that atmosphere was the breath of life to her. Soon she could not imagine finding any real value in life without it. She often considered plain girls, dull girls, middle-aged women who had never had any beauty, any saving grace but that of freshness, and wondered how they managed to get along at all. What was the use of life to them? Nobody bothered about them, except, perhaps, a few relations, or what are called “old friends”—that is, people who, having always been accustomed to you, put up with you comfortably, and wear their carpet slippers in your presence without troubling whether you like slippers or would prefer them in high-heeled shoes.
As to old women, those from whom almost the last vestiges of what they once had been physically had fallen away, she was always charming to them; but she always wondered why they still seemed to cling on to life. They were done with. It was long ago all over for them. They did not matter any more, even if once they had mattered. Why did they still keep a hold on life with their skinny hands? Was it from fear of death, or what? Once she expressed her wonder about this to a man.
“Of course,” she said. “I know they can’t go just because they want to. But why do they want to stay?”
“Oh,” he said, “I think lots of old ladies enjoy themselves immensely in their own way.”
“Well, I can’t understand it!” she said.
And she spoke the truth.
She flirted, of course. Her youthful years were complicated by a maze of flirtations, through which she wandered with apparently the greatest assurance, gaining knowledge of men.