Chapter 2 - Page 2

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 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