For Elma the world held no future. Though surrounded by every luxury in that magnificent Park Lane mansion, the millionaire home that was the most notable in all London’s modern houses, her only thoughts were of her father and of her lover Roddy.
She hated that fat, beady-eyed but elegantly-dressed man whom Mr Harrison had introduced to her father, and who was now so openly making love to her. His words and his manner were alike artificial. The feminine mind is always astute, and she knew that whatever he said was mere empty compliment. She saw upon his lips the sign of sensuousness, a sign that no woman fails to note. Sensuousness and real love are things apart, and every woman can discriminate them. Men are deceivers. Women may, on the other hand, allure, and be it said that the vampire woman like Freda Crisp is ever with us.
In the life of London, of Paris, or of New York, the vampire woman in society plays a part which is seldom suspected.
They are in a class by themselves, as was Freda Crisp. The vampire woman is the popular term for a woman who lives by preying upon others; men usually, but upon her own sex if occasion demands.
Freda Crisp, though few of the characters in this human drama of love and cupidity had suspected her, was a case in point. She was a type that was interesting. As a girl of eighteen everyone admired her for her charm of manner, her conversational gifts and her bright intellect, which was marred only by a rather too lively imagination, and a tendency to romance so ingeniously that no one ever knew if she told the truth or not.
Her career was abnormal, and yet not stranger than that of some others in these post-war days.
At nineteen she had been to prison for swindling. Physically she was wonderfully fascinating, but her chief characteristic was an absence of all real affection and moral feeling. Even as a girl she could profess passionate love for those from whom she expected profit and gain; but misfortune and death, even of those nearest her, would leave her quite unmoved.
She was a perfect type of the modern adventuress. She could act well, and at times would shed tears profusely if she thought it the right thing at the moment.
As she grew older her unrestrained coquetry threw her into the vicious adventurous circle of which Gordon Gray was the master and moving spirit. She threw in her lot with him. On board a transatlantic liner on which she went for a trip to New York an officer fell a victim to her charms, and supplied her with money that was not his. His defalcations were discovered, and he committed suicide to escape disgrace.
That was the first unpleasant incident in her career after meeting Gray. There were many afterwards. She was a woman whose sole aim was to see and enjoy life. Without heart and without feeling, active, not passive in her love-making, she, like many another woman before her, aspired to power and influence over men, and many an honourable career was wrecked by her, and much gain had gone into the joint pockets of Gordon Gray and herself.