This, however, did not prevent me from loving Roseye Lethmere, daughter of Sir Herbert, who had come into my life quite unexpectedly a year ago.
As she stood there chatting with us, attired in her airwoman’s clothes, her appearance was certainly workwomanlike. She was dressed in a wool-lined leather coat, and overall trousers, with a knitted Balaclava helmet, and over that again a leather skull-cap, the whole tied down tightly beneath the chin. A huge khaki woollen muffler was around her throat, while a pair of unsightly goggles hanging around her neck completed the picture. She had followed my advice, I noted, and tied her muffler very securely around her chin.
How very different she looked at that moment to when I took her—as I so frequently did—to a play, and afterwards to supper at the Carlton, the Savoy, or Ciro’s. She was a girl who, on the outbreak of war, had decided to play her part in the national crisis, and she certainly had done so.
Three times had she flown across the Channel with me, and three times had we returned in safety to Hendon.
Indeed, only a week before, she had flown by herself on a British-built Duperdussin with 100 horse-power Anzani engines from Brooklands across to France, descending a mile outside Abbeville. She had had lunch at the old Tête de Boeuf hotel in that town, and returned, landing safely at Hendon—a feat that no woman had ever before accomplished.
Roseye Lethmere certainly possessed a character that was all her own.
In her ordinary costume, as a London girl, she was inexpressibly dainty and extremely well dressed. Her curiously soft blue eyes, almost child-like in their purity of expression, were admired everywhere. Whenever, however, her picture appeared in the papers it was always in her flying costume.
Most women, when they take up any outdoor exercise, be it hunting, golfing, strenuous tennis, or sport of any kind, usually acquire a certain indescribable hardness of feature, a sign by which, when they sit in the stalls of a theatre, the mere man at once knows them.
But the beauty of Miss Rosie—as she was known at Hendon—in spite of her many exciting and perilous exploits in the air, was still soft and sweet, as it should be with any fresh healthy girl of twenty-two.
The workmen started hammering again, fitting a new propeller to a machine in course of hurried completion for the front, so we all three went outside, where our own machines stood close together.