Seriously," she continued, "if you'd been married, Bunny, you wouldn't
have had half such a beastly time. You're one of those leaning, clinging
little women who require a strong, safe man to support them. You ought
to be married."

Miss Keating smiled a little sad, spiritual smile, and said that was the
last thing she wanted.

"Well," said Kitty, "I didn't say it was the first."

Kitty's smile was neither sad nor spiritual. She uncurled herself, got
up, and stood over her companion, stroking her sleek, thin hair.

Miss Keating purred under the caress. She held up her hand to Kitty who
took it and gave it a squeeze before she let it go.

"Poor Bunny. Nice Bunny," she said (as if Miss Keating were an animal).
She stretched out her arms, turned, and disappeared through the lounge
into the billiard-room.

CHAPTER III

It could not be denied that Kitty had a charm. Miss Keating was not
denying it, even now, when she was saying to herself that Kitty had a
way of attracting very disagreeable attention.

At first she had supposed that this was an effect of Kitty's charm,
disagreeable to Kitty. Then, even in the beginning, she had seen that
there was something deliberate and perpetual in Kitty's challenge of the
public eye. The public eye, so far from pursuing Kitty, was itself
pursued, tracked down and captured. Kitty couldn't let it go. Publicity
was what Kitty coveted.

She had then supposed that Kitty was used to it; that she was, in some
mysterious way, a personage. There would be temptations, she had
imagined, for any one who had a charm that lived thus in the public eye.

And Kitty had her good points, too. There was nobody so easy to live
with as Kitty in her private capacity, if she could be said to have one.
She never wanted to be amused, or read to, or sat up with late at night,
like the opulent invalids Miss Keating had been with hitherto. Miss
Keating owed everything she had to Kitty, her health (she was
constitutionally anaemic), her magnificent salary, the luxurious gaiety
in which they lived and moved (moved, perhaps, rather more than lived).
The very combs in her hair were Kitty's. So were the gowns she wore on
occasions of splendour and display. It struck her as odd that they were
all public, these occasions, things they paid to go to.

It had dawned on her by this time, coldly, disagreeably, that Kitty
Tailleur was nobody, nobody, that is to say, in particular. A person of
no account in th