I was brought up very carefully.
We had a shop - a very high class shop - art needlework.
I was never the sort of girl who had a lot of boy friends or made herself cheap.
But Terry was different.
He was Irish - and he was going overseas... He never wrote or anything. I suppose I was a fool.
So there it was, you see. I was in trouble - just like some dreadful little servant girl..."
Her voice was disdainful in its snobbery.
"Aristide was wonderful.
He said everything would be all right.
He said he was lonely.
We'd be married at once, he said.
It was like a dream.
And then I found out he was the great Mr Leonides.
He owned masses of shops and restaurants and night clubs.
It was quite like a fairy tale, wasn't it?"
"One kind of a fairy tale," I said drily.
"We were married at a little church in the City - and then we went abroad."
"And the child?"
She looked at me with eyes that came back from a long distance.
"There wasn't a child after all.
It was all a mistake." She smiled, the curled up sideways crooked smile. "I vowed to myself that I'd be a really good wife to him, and I was.
I ordered all the kinds of food he liked, and wore the colours he fancied and I did all I could to please him.
And he was happy.
But we never got rid of that family of his.
Always coming and sponging and living in his pocket.
Old Miss de Haviland - I think she ought to have gone away when he got married.
I said so.
But Aristide said,
'She's been here so long. It's her home now.'
The truth is he liked to have them all about and underfoot.
They were beastly to me, but he never seemed to notice that or to mind about it.
Roger hates me - have you seen Roger?
He's always hated me.
He's jealous. And Philip's so stuck up he never speaks to me.
And now they're trying to pretend I murdered him - and I didn't - I didn't!" She leaned towards me. "Please believe I didn't?"
I found her very pathetic.
The contemptuous way the Leonides family had spoken of her, their eagerness to believe that she had committed the crime - now, at this moment, it all seemed positively inhuman conduct.
She was alone, defenceless, hunted down.
"And if it's not me, they think it's Laurence," she went on.
"What about Laurence?" I asked.
"I'm terribly sorry for Laurence.
He's delicate and he couldn't go and fight.
It's not because he was a coward. It's because he's sensitive.
I've tried to cheer him up and to make him feel happy.
He has to teach those horrible children.
Eustace is always sneering at him, and Josephine - well, you've seen Josephine.
You know what she's like."
I said I hadn't met Josephine yet.
"Sometimes I think that child isn't right in her head.
She has horrible sneaky ways, and she looks queer... She gives me the shivers sometimes."