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_ No one was kinder to me at that time than Rose Waterford.
She combined a masculine intelligence with a feminine perversity,
and the novels she wrote were original and disconcerting.
It was at her house one day that I met Charles Strickland's wife.
Miss Waterford was giving a tea-party, and her small room was
more than usually full. Everyone seemed to be talking, and I,
sitting in silence, felt awkward; but I was too shy to break
into any of the groups that seemed absorbed in their own affairs.
Miss Waterford was a good hostess, and seeing my embarrassment
came up to me.
"I want you to talk to Mrs. Strickland," she said.
"She's raving about your book."
"What does she do?" I asked.
I was conscious of my ignorance, and if Mrs. Strickland was a
well-known writer I thought it as well to ascertain the fact
before I spoke to her.
Rose Waterford cast down her eyes demurely to give greater
effect to her reply.
"She gives luncheon-parties. You've only got to roar a
little, and she'll ask you."
Rose Waterford was a cynic. She looked upon life as an
opportunity for writing novels and the public as her raw
material. Now and then she invited members of it to her house
if they showed an appreciation of her talent and entertained
with proper lavishness. She held their weakness for lions in
good-humoured contempt, but played to them her part of the
distinguished woman of letters with decorum.
I was led up to Mrs. Strickland, and for ten minutes we
talked together. I noticed nothing about her except that she
had a pleasant voice. She had a flat in Westminster, overlooking
the unfinished cathedral, and because we lived in the same
neighbourhood we felt friendly disposed to one another.
The Army and Navy Stores are a bond of union between all who dwell
between the river and St. James's Park. Mrs. Strickland asked
me for my address, and a few days later I received an
invitation to luncheon.
My engagements were few, and I was glad to accept. When I
arrived, a little late, because in my fear of being too early
I had walked three times round the cathedral, I found the
party already complete. Miss Waterford was there and Mrs. Jay,
Richard Twining and George Road. We were all writers.
It was a fine day, early in spring, and we were in a good humour.
We talked about a hundred things. Miss Waterford,
torn between the aestheticism of her early youth, when she
used to go to parties in sage green, holding a daffodil, and
the flippancy of her maturer years, which tended to high heels
and Paris frocks, wore a new hat. It put her in high spirits.
I had never heard her more malicious about our common friends.
Mrs. Jay, aware that impropriety is the soul of wit, made
observations in tones hardly above a whisper that might well
have tinged the snowy tablecloth with a rosy hue.
Richard Twining bubbled over with quaint absurdities, and
George Road, conscious that he need not exhibit a brilliancy which
was almost a by-word, opened his mouth only to put food into it.
Mrs. Strickland did not talk much, but she had a pleasant gift
for keeping the conversation general; and when there was a
pause she threw in just the right remark to set it going once more.
She was a woman of thirty-seven, rather tall and plump,
without being fat; she was not pretty, but her face was
pleasing, chiefly, perhaps, on account of her kind brown eyes.
Her skin was rather sallow. Her dark hair was elaborately dressed.
She was the only woman of the three whose face was
free of make-up, and by contrast with the others she seemed
simple and unaffected.
The dining-room was in the good taste of the period. It was
very severe. There was a high dado of white wood and a green
paper on which were etchings by Whistler in neat black frames.
The green curtains with their peacock design, hung in straight
lines, and the green carpet, in the pattern of which pale
rabbits frolicked among leafy trees, suggested the influence
of William Morris. There was blue delft on the chimneypiece.
At that time there must have been five hundred dining-rooms in
London decorated in exactly the same manner. It was chaste,
artistic, and dull.
When we left I walked away with Miss Waterford, and the fine
day and her new hat persuaded us to saunter through the Park.
"That was a very nice party," I said.
"Did you think the food was good? I told her that if she
wanted writers she must feed them well."
"Admirable advice," I answered. "But why does she want them?"
Miss Waterford shrugged her shoulders.
"She finds them amusing. She wants to be in the movement.
I fancy she's rather simple, poor dear, and she thinks we're
all wonderful. After all, it pleases her to ask us to luncheon,
and it doesn't hurt us. I like her for it."
Looking back, I think that Mrs. Strickland was the most
harmless of all the lion-hunters that pursue their quarry from
the rarefied heights of Hampstead to the nethermost studios of
Cheyne Walk. She had led a very quiet youth in the country,
and the books that came down from Mudie's Library brought with
them not only their own romance, but the romance of London.
She had a real passion for reading (rare in her kind, who for
the most part are more interested in the author than in his book,
in the painter than in his pictures), and she invented a
world of the imagination in which she lived with a freedom she
never acquired in the world of every day. When she came to
know writers it was like adventuring upon a stage which till
then she had known only from the other side of the footlights.
She saw them dramatically, and really seemed herself to live a
larger life because she entertained them and visited them in
their fastnesses. She accepted the rules with which they
played the game of life as valid for them, but never for a
moment thought of regulating her own conduct in accordance
with them. Their moral eccentricities, like their oddities of dress,
their wild theories and paradoxes, were an entertainment which
amused her, but had not the slightest influence on her convictions.
"Is there a Mr. Strickland?" I asked
"Oh yes; he's something in the city. I believe he's a
stockbroker. He's very dull."
"Are they good friends?"
"They adore one another. You'll meet him if you dine there.
But she doesn't often have people to dinner. He's very quiet.
He's not in the least interested in literature or the arts."
"Why do nice women marry dull men?"
"Because intelligent men won't marry nice women."
I could not think of any retort to this, so I asked if Mrs.
Strickland had children.
"Yes; she has a boy and a girl. They're both at school."
The subject was exhausted, and we began to talk of other things. _
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