a frail creature was just an object of pity. This contention on my part
had at first of course been jocular; but strange to say it was quite the
ground I found myself taking with regard to our young lady after I had
begun to know her. I couldn't have said what I felt about her except
that she was undefended; from the first of my sitting with her there
after dinner, under the stars--that was a week at Folkestone of balmy
nights and muffled tides and crowded chairs--I became aware both that
protection was wholly absent from her life and that she was wholly
indifferent to its absence. The odd thing was that she was not
appealing: she was abjectly, divinely conceited, absurdly fantastically
pleased. Her beauty was as yet all the world to her, a world she had
plenty to do to live in. Mrs. Meldrum told me more about her, and there
was nothing that, as the centre of a group of giggling, nudging
spectators, Flora wasn't ready to tell about herself. She held her
little court in the crowd, upon the grass, playing her light over Jews
and Gentiles, completely at ease in all promiscuities. It was an effect
of these things that from the very first, with every one listening, I
could mention that my main business with her would be just to have a go
at her head and to arrange in that view for an early sitting. It would
have been as impossible, I think, to be impertinent to her as it would
have been to throw a stone at a plate-glass window; so any talk that went
forward on the basis of her loveliness was the most natural thing in the
world and immediately became the most general and sociable. It was when
I saw all this that I judged how, though it was the last thing she asked
for, what one would ever most have at her service was a curious
compassion. That sentiment was coloured by the vision of the dire
exposure of a being whom vanity had put so off her guard. Hers was the
only vanity I have ever known that made its possessor superlatively soft.
Mrs. Meldrum's further information contributed moreover to these
indulgences--her account of the girl's neglected childhood and queer