MY WIFE is a very unpunctual woman, so when, having arranged to lunch with her at Claridge’s, I arrived there ten minutes late and did not find her I was not surprised.
I ordered a cocktail.
It was the height of the season and there were but two or three vacant tables in the lounge.
Some of the people after an early meal were drinking their coffee, others like myself were toying with a dry Martini; the women in their summer frocks looked gay and charming and the men debonair; but I could see no one whose appearance sufficiently interested me to occupy the quarter of an hour I was expecting to wait.
They were slim and pleasant to look upon, well dressed and carelessly at ease, but they were for the most part of a pattern and I observed them with tolerance rather than with curiosity.
But it was two o’clock and I felt hungry.
My wife tells me that she can wear neither a turquoise nor a watch, for the turquoise turns green and the watch stops; and this she attributes to the malignity of fate.
I have nothing to say about the turquoise, but I sometimes think the watch might go if she wound it.
I was engaged with these reflections when an attendant came up and with that hushed significance that hotel attendants affect (as though their message held a more sinister meaning than their words suggested) told me that a lady had just telephoned to say that she had been detained and could not lunch with me.
I hesitated.
It is not very amusing to eat in a crowded restaurant by oneself, but it was late to go to a club and I decided that I had better stay where I was.
I strolled into the dining-room.
It has never given me any particular satisfaction (as it appears to do to so many elegant persons) to be known by name to the head waiters of fashionable restaurants, but on this occasion I should certainly have been glad to be greeted by less stony an eye.
The maitre d’hotel with a set and hostile face told me that every table was occupied.
I looked helplessly round the large and stately room and on a sudden to my pleasure caught sight of someone I knew.
Lady Elizabeth Vermont was an old friend.
She smiled and noticing that she was alone I went up to her.
“Will you take pity on a hungry man and let me sit with you?” I asked.
“Oh, do.
But I’ve nearly finished.”
She was at a little table by the side of a massive column and when I took my place I found that notwithstanding the crowd we sat almost in privacy.
“This is a bit of luck for me,” I said.
“I was on the point of fainting from hunger.”
She had a very agreeable smile; it did not light up her face suddenly, but seemed rather to suffuse it by degrees with charm.
It hesitated for a moment about her lips and then slowly travelled to those great shining eyes of hers and there softly lingered.
No one surely could say that Elizabeth Vermont was cast in the common mould.
I never knew her when she was a girl, but many have told me that then she was so lovely, it brought the tears to one’s eyes, and I could well believe it; for now, though fifty, she was still incomparable.
Her ravaged beauty made the fresh and blooming comeliness of youth a trifle insipid.
I do not like these painted faces that look all alike; and I think women are foolish to dull their expression and obscure their personality with powder, rouge, and lipstick.
But Elizabeth Vermont painted not to imitate nature, but to improve it; you did not question the means but applauded the result.
The flaunting boldness with which she used cosmetics increased rather than diminished the character of that perfect face.
I suppose her hair was dyed; it was black and sleek and shining.
She held herself upright as though she had never learned to loll and she was very slim.
She wore a dress of black satin, the lines and simplicity of which were admirable, and about her neck was a long rope of pearls.
Her only other jewel was an enormous emerald which guarded her wedding-ring, and its sombre fire emphasized the whiteness of her hand.
But it was in her hands with their reddened nails that she most clearly betrayed her age; they had none of a girl’s soft and dimpled roundness; and you could not but look at them with a certain dismay.
Before very long they would look like the talons of a bird of prey.
Elizabeth Vermont was a remarkable woman.
Of great birth, for she was the daughter of the seventh Duke of St Erth, she married at the age of eighteen a very rich man and started at once upon a career of astounding extravagance, lewdness, and dissipation.
She was too proud to be cautious, too reckless to think of consequences, and within two years her husband in circumstances of appalling scandal divorced her.
She married then one of the three corespondents named in the case and eighteen months later ran away from him.
Then followed a succession of lovers.
She became notorious for her profligacy.
Her startling beauty and her scandalous conduct held her in the public eye and it was never very long but that she gave the gossips something to talk about.
Her name stank in the nostrils of decent people.
She was a gambler, a spendthrift, and a wanton.
But though unfaithful to her lovers she was constant to her friends and there always remained a few who would never allow, whatever she did, that she was anything but a very nice woman.
She had candour, high spirits, and courage. She was never a hypocrite. She was generous and sincere.
It was at this period of her life that I came to know her; for great ladies, now that religion is out of fashion, when they are very much blown upon take a flattering interest in the arts.
When they receive the cold shoulder from members of their own class they condescend sometimes to the society of writers, painters, and musicians.