and troubadour, she surrendered. He told her many wonders of fairy things.
He led her into lands where woman's soul is free and dances on buttercups.
He made exquisite verses to her auburn hair. But when she learned that
these same verses were composed in a flat in Milan which he shared with a
naughty little opera singer of no account, she dismissed Prince Charming
offhand, and betook herself alone to the middle of Abyssinia to satisfy her
curiosity as to the existence there of dulcimer-playing maidens singing of
Mount Abora to whom Coleridge in his poem assigns such haunting attributes.

Lady Auriol, in fact, was a great traveller. She had not only gone all over
the world--anybody can do that--but she had gone all through the world.
Alone, she had taken her fate in her hands. In comparison with other
geographical exploits, her journey through Abyssinia was but a trip to
Margate. She had wandered about Turkestan. She had crossed China. She had
fooled about Saghalien.... In her schooldays, hearing of the Sanjak of Novi
Bazar, she had imagined the Sanjak to be a funny little man in a red cap.
Riper knowledge, after its dull exasperating way, had brought disillusion;
but like Mount Abora the name haunted her until she explored it for
herself. When she came back, she knew the Sanjak of Novi Bazar like her
pocket.

Needless to say that Lady Auriol had thrown all her curiosities, her
illusions--they were hydra-headed--her enthusiasms and her splendid
vitality into the war. She had organized and directed as Commandant a great
hospital in the region of Boulogne. "I'm a woman of business," she told
Lackaday and myself, "not a ministering angel with open-worked stockings
and a Red Cross of rubies dangling in front of me. Most of the day I sit
in a beastly office and work at potatoes and beef and army-forms. I can't
nurse, though I daresay I could if I tried; but I hate amateurs. No
amateurs in my show, I assure you. For my job I flatter myself I'm trained.