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 of Mrs. Meldrum. "You're probably, with one exception, the
sanest person she knows, and you at least wouldn't scandalously fleece
her."

"How do you know what I wouldn't do?" my humorous friend demanded. "Of
course I've thought how I can help her--it has kept me awake at night.
But doing it's impossible; she'll take nothing from me. You know what
she does--she hugs me and runs away. She has an instinct about me and