The Author's Press Series of the Works of Elinor Glyn


THE POINT OF VIEW


ELINOR GLYN




CHAPTER I


The restaurant of the Grand Hotel in Rome was filling up. People
were dining rather late--it was the end of May and the
entertainments were lessening, so they could dawdle over their
repasts and smoke their cigarettes in peace.

Stella Rawson came in with her uncle and aunt, Canon and the
Honorable Mrs. Ebley, and they took their seats in a secluded
corner. They looked a little out of place--and felt it--amid this
more or less gay company. But the drains of the Grand Hotel were
known to be beyond question, and, coming to Rome so late in the
season, the Reverend Canon Ebley felt it was wiser to risk the
contamination of the over-worldly-minded than a possible attack of
typhoid fever. The belief in a divine protection did not give him
or his lady wife that serenity it might have done, and they
traveled fearfully, taking with them their own jaeger sheets among
other precautions.