FullReads

“I met such a charming woman last night,” he said, “a Mrs. Clifton Courtenay, a delightful woman.”

“Oh, do you know her?” I exclaimed. “Oh, we’re very old friends. She’s always wanting me to go and see her. I really must.”

“Oh, I didn’t know you knew her,” he answered. Somehow, the fact of my knowing her seemed to lessen her importance in his eyes. But soon he recovered his enthusiasm for her.

“A wonderfully clever woman,” he continued. “I’m afraid I disappointed her a little though.” He said this, however, with a laugh that contradicted his words. “She would not believe I was the Mr. Smith. She imagined from my book that I was quite an old man.”

I could see nothing in my friend’s book myself to suggest that the author was, of necessity, anything over eighteen. The mistake appeared to me to display want of acumen, but it had evidently pleased him greatly.

“I felt quite sorry for her,” he went on, “chained to that bloodless, artificial society in which she lives. ‘You can’t tell,’ she said to me, ‘how I long to meet someone to whom I could show my real self–who would understand me.’ I’m going to see her on Wednesday.”

I went with him. My conversation with her was not as confidential as I had anticipated, owing to there being some eighty other people present in a room intended for the accommodation of eight; but after surging round for an hour in hot and aimless misery–as very young men at such gatherings do, knowing as a rule only the man who has brought them, and being unable to find him–I contrived to get a few words with her.

She greeted me with a smile, in the light of which I at once forgot my past discomfort, and let her fingers rest, with delicious pressure, for a moment upon mine.

“How good of you to keep your promise,” she said. “These people have been tiring me so. Sit here, and tell me all you have been doing.”

She listened for about ten seconds, and then interrupted me with–

“And that clever friend of yours that you came with. I met him at dear Lady Lennon’s last week. Has he written anything?”

I explained to her that he had.

“Tell me about it?” she said. “I get so little time for reading, and then I only care to read the books that help me,” and she gave me a grateful look more eloquent than words.

I described the work to her, and wishing to do my friend justice I even recited a few of the passages upon which, as I knew, he especially prided himself.

One sentence in particular seemed to lay hold of her. “A good woman’s arms round a man’s neck is a lifebelt thrown out to him from heaven.”

“How beautiful!” she murmured. “Say it again.”

I said it again, and she repeated it after me.

Then a noisy old lady swooped down upon her, and I drifted away into a corner, where I tried to look as if I were enjoying myself, and failed.

Later on, feeling it time to go, I sought my friend, and found him talking to her in a corner. I approached and waited. They were discussing the latest east-end murder. A drunken woman had been killed by her husband, a hard-working artizan, who had been maddened by the ruin of his home.

“Ah,” she was saying, “what power a woman has to drag a man down or lift him up. I never read a case in which a woman is concerned without thinking of those beautiful lines of yours: ‘A good woman’s arms round a man’s neck is a lifebelt thrown out to him from heaven.'”

* * * * *

Opinions differed concerning her religion and politics. Said the Low Church parson: “An earnest Christian woman, sir, of that unostentatious type that has always been the bulwark of our Church. I am proud to know that woman, and I am proud to think that poor words of mine have been the humble instrument to wean that true woman’s heart from the frivolities of fashion, and to fix her thoughts upon higher things. A good Churchwoman, sir, a good Churchwoman, in the best sense of the word.”