good humour!

BOOK III

THE DARK VEIL

CHAPTER I

THE GIRL WITH THE LETTER

Brightening continued to be fun. As time went on I brightened charming
people, queer people, people with their hearts in the right place and
their "H's" in the wrong one. I was an expensive luxury, but it paid to
have me, as it pays to get a good doctor or the best quality in boots.

After several successful operations and some lurid adventures, I was
doing so well on the whole that I felt the need of a secretary. How to
hit on the right person was the problem, for I wanted her young, but not
too young; pretty, but not too pretty; lively, not giddy; sensible, yet
never a bore; a lady, but not a howling swell; accomplished, but not
overwhelming; in fact, perfection.

This time I didn't hide my light under a bushel of initials, nor in a
box at a newspaper office. I announced that the "Princess di Miramare
requires immediately the services of a gentlewoman (aged from twenty-one
to thirty) for secretarial work four or five hours six days of the week.
Must be intelligent and experienced typist-stenographer. Salary, three
guineas a week. Apply personally, between 9:30 and 11:30 A. M. No
letters considered."

I gave the address of my own flat and awaited developments with high
hope; for I conceitedly expected an "ad." under my own name to attract a
good class of applicants.

It appeared in several London dailies and succeeded like a July sale. I
wouldn't have believed that there were such crowds of pretty typists on
earth! Luckily, the lift boy was young, so he enjoyed the rush.

As for me, I felt like a spider that has got religion and pities its
flies; there were so many flies--I mean girls--and each in one way or
other was more desirable than the rest! I might have been reduced to
tossing up a copper or having the applicants draw lots, if something
very special hadn't happened.

The twenty-sixth girl brought a letter of introduction from Robert
Lorillard.

_Robert Lorillard!_ Why, the very name is a thrill!

Of course I was in love with Robert Lorillard when I was seventeen, just
before the war. Everybody was in love with him that year. It was the
fashionable thing to be. Whenever Grandmother let me come up to town I
went to the theatre to adore dear Robert. Women used to boast that
they'd seen him fifty times in some favourite play. But never did he act
on the stage so stirring a part as that thrust upon him in Augus