Lena still comes and talks to me. To hear her you would suppose that Lawson Young and Dickey Harper never existed, that her passion for Norman Hippisley was the unique, solitary manifestation of her soul. It certainly burnt with the intensest flame. It certainly consumed her. What's left of her's all shrivelled, warped, as she writhed in her fire.
Yesterday she said to me, "Roly, I'm glad he's dead. Safe from her clutches."
She'll cling for a little while to this last illusion: that he had been reluctant; but I doubt if she really believes it now.
For you see, Ethel flourishes. In passion, you know, nothing succeeds like success; and her affair with Norman Hippisley advertised her, so that very soon it ranked as the first of a series of successes. She goes about dressed in stained-glass futurist muslins, and contrives provocative effects out of a tilted nose, and sulky eyes, and sallowness set off by a black velvet band on the forehead, and a black scarf of hair dragged tight from a raking backward peak.
I saw her the other night sketching a frivolous gesture—
THE DICE THROWER — By SIDNEY SOUTHGATE
(Thomas Moult)
(From Colour)