Francesca Bassington sat in the drawing-room of her
house in Blue Street, W., regaling herself and her
estimable brother Henry with China tea and small cress
sandwiches. The meal was of that elegant proportion
which, while ministering sympathetically to the desires
of the moment, is happily reminiscent of a satisfactory
luncheon and blessedly expectant of an elaborate dinner
to come.
In her younger days Francesca had been known as the
beautiful Miss Greech; at forty, although much of
the original beauty remained, she was just dear Francesca
Bassington. No one would have dreamed of calling
her sweet, but a good many people who scarcely knew
her were punctilious about putting in the “dear.”
Her enemies, in their honester moments, would have
admitted that she was svelte and knew how to dress,
but they would have agreed with her friends in asserting
that she had no soul. When one’s friends
and enemies agree on any particular point they are
usually wrong. Francesca herself, if pressed
in an unguarded moment to describe her soul, would
probably have described her drawing-room. Not
that she would have considered that the one had stamped
the impress of its character on the other, so that
close scrutiny might reveal its outstanding features,
and even suggest its hidden places, but because she
might have dimly recognised that her drawing-room
was her soul.
Francesca was one of those women towards whom Fate
appears to have the best intentions and never to carry
them into practice. With the advantages put
at her disposal she might have been expected to command
a more than average share of feminine happiness.
So many of the things that make for fretfulness,
disappointment and discouragement in a woman’s
life were removed from her path that she might well
have been considered the fortunate Miss Greech, or
later, lucky Francesca Bassington. And she was
not of the perverse band of those who make a rock-garden
of their souls by dragging into them all the stoney
griefs and unclaimed troubles they can find lying
around them. Francesca loved the smooth ways
and pleasant places of life; she liked not merely
to look on the bright side of things but to live there
and stay there. And the fact that things had,
at one time and another, gone badly with her and cheated
her of some of her early illusions made her cling the
closer to such good fortune as remained to her now
that she seemed to have reached a calmer period of
her life. To undiscriminating friends she appeared
in the guise of a rather selfish woman, but it was
merely the selfishness of one who had seen the happy
and unhappy sides of life and wished to enjoy to the
utmost what was left to her of the former. The
vicissitudes of fortune had not soured her, but they
had perhaps narrowed her in the sense of making her
concentrate much of her sympathies on things that
immediately pleased and amused her, or that recalled
and perpetuated the pleasing and successful incidents
of other days. And it was her drawing-room in
particular that enshrined the memorials or tokens
of past and present happiness.
