NANCY ROSS


I

Mr. Munty Ross's house was certainly the smartest in March Square; No.
14, where the Duchess of Crole lived, was shabby in comparison. Very
often you may see a line of motor-cars and carriages stretching down the
Square, then round the corner into Lent Street, and you may know
then--as, indeed, all the Square did know and most carefully
observed--that Mrs. Munty Boss was giving another of her smart little
parties. That dark-green door, that neat overhanging balcony, those
rows--in the summer months--of scarlet geraniums, that roll of carpet
that ran, many times a week, from the door over the pavement to the very
foot of the waiting vehicle--these things were Mrs. Munty Ross's.

Munty Ross--a silent, ugly, black little man--had had made his money in
potted shrimps, or something equally compact and indigestible, and it
really was very nice to think that anything in time could blossom out
into beauty as striking as Mrs. Munty's lovely dresses, or melody as
wonderful as the voice of M. Radiziwill, the famous tenor, whom she
often "turned on" at her little evening parties. Upon Mr. Munty alone
the shrimps seemed to have made no effect. He was as black, as
insignificant, as ugly as ever he had been in the days before he knew of
a shrimp's possibilities. He was very silent at his wife's parties, and
sometimes dropped his h's. What Mrs. Munty had been before her marriage
no one quite knew, but now she was flaxen and slim and beautifully
clothed, with a voice like an insincere canary; she had "a passion for
the Opera," a "passion for motoring," "a passion for the latest
religion," and "a passion for the simple life." All these things did the