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to right: Miss Barbara Pilbrick, Sir Edward Tuke, Lady Pamela Westrope, Captain “Tuppy”
Benacre.’
Lovely, lovely, golden world! On two occasions the face of an old schoolfellow looked at
Elizabeth from the page. It hurt her in her breast to see it. There they all were, her old schoolfellows,
with their horses and their cars and their husbands in the cavalry; and here she, tied to that dreadful
job, that dreadful pension, her dreadful mother! Was it possible that there was no escape? Could she
be doomed for ever to this sordid meanness, with no hope of ever getting back to the decent world
again?
It was not unnatural, with the example of her mother before her eyes, that Elizabeth should have a
healthy loathing of Art. In fact, any excess of intellect–‘braininess’ was her word for it–tended to
belong, in her eyes, to the ‘beastly’. Real people, she felt, decent people–people who shot grouse,
went to Ascot, yachted at Cowes–were not brainy. They didn’t go in for this nonsense of writing
books and footling with paint brushes; and all these highbrow ideas–Socialism and all that.
‘Highbrow’ was a bitter word in her vocabulary. And when it happened, as it did once or twice, that
she met a veritable artist who was willing to work penniless all his life rather than sell himself to a
bank or an insurance company, she despised him far more than she despised the dabblers of her
mother’s circle. That a man should turn deliberately away from all that was good and decent,
sacrifice himself for a futility that led nowhere, was shameful, degrading, evil. She dreaded
spinsterhood, but she would have endured it a thousand lifetimes through rather than marry such a
man.
When Elizabeth had been nearly two years in Paris her mother thed abruptly of ptomaine poisoning.
The wonder was that she had not thed of it sooner. Elizabeth was left with rather less than a hundred
pounds in the world. Her uncle and aunt cabled at once from Burma, asking her to come out and stay
with them, and saying that a letter would follow.
Mrs Lackersteen had reflected for some time over the letter, her pen between her lips, looking
down at the page with her delicate triangular face like a meditative snake.
‘I suppose we must have her out here, at any rate for a year. What a bore! However, they generally
marry within a year if they’ve any looks at all. What am I to say to the girl, Tom?’
‘Say? Oh, just say she’ll pick up a husband out here a damn sight easier than at Home. Something of
that sort, y’know.’
‘My dear Tom! What impossible things you say!’
Mrs Lackersteen wrote:
Of course, this is a very small station and we are in the jungle a great deal of the time. I’m afraid you will find it dreadfully
dull after the delights of Paris. But really in some ways these small stations have their advantages for a young girl. She finds
herself quite a queen in the local society. The unmarried men are so lonely that they appreciate a girl’s society in a quite
wonderful way etc. etc.
Elizabeth spent thirty pounds on summer frocks and set sail immediately. The ship, heralded by
rolling porpoises, ploughed across the Mediterranean and down the Canal into a sea of staring,
enamel-like blue, then out into the green wastes of the Indian Ocean, where flocks of flying fish
skimmed in terror from the approaching hull. At night the waters were phosphorescent, and the wash