continental relegations, with straying squabbling Monte-Carlo-haunting
parents; the more invidious picture, above all, of her pecuniary
arrangement, still in force, with the Hammond Synges, who really, though
they never took her out--practically she went out alone--had their hands
half the time in her pocket. She had to pay for everything, down to her
share of the wine-bills and the horses' fodder, down to Bertie Hammond
Synge's fare in the "underground" when he went to the City for her. She
had been left with just money enough to turn her head; and it hadn't even
been put in trust, nothing prudent or proper had been done with it. She
could spend her capital, and at the rate she was going, expensive,
extravagant and with a swarm of parasites to help, it certainly wouldn't
last very long.

"Couldn't _you_ perhaps take her, independent, unencumbered as you are?"
I asked of Mrs. Meldrum. "You're probably, with one exception, the
sanest person she knows, and you at least wouldn't scandalously fleece
her."

"How do you know what I wouldn't do?" my humorous friend demanded. "Of
course I've thought how I can help her--it has kept me awake at night.
But doing it's impossible; she'll take nothing from me. You know what
she does--she hugs me and runs away. She has an instinct about me and
feels that I've one about her. And then she dislikes me for another
reason that I'm not quite clear about, but that I'm well aware of and
that I shall find out some day. So far as her settling with me goes it
would be impossible moreover here; she wants naturally enough a much
wider field. She must live in London--her game is there. So she takes
the line of adoring me, of saying she can never forget that I was devoted
to her mother--which I wouldn't for the world have been--and of giving me
a wide berth. I think she positively dislikes to look at me. It's all