The Essential Elinor Glyn Collection. Glyn Elinor

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      She had felt she wanted Vincent Cricklander because he belonged to one of the old families in New York and played polo well, and, being a great heiress though of no pretensions to birth, she wished to have an undisputed entry into the inner circle of her own country. He fulfilled her requirements for quite three years, and then she felt she was "through" with America, and wanted fresh fields for her efforts. Paris was too easy, Berlin doubtful, Vienna and Petersburg impossible to conquer, but London would hold out everything that she could wish for. Only, it must be the very best of London, not the part of its society that anyone can struggle and push and pay to get into, but the real thing. She was "quite finished" with Vincent Cricklander, too, at this period; to see him play polo no longer gave her any thrill. So one morning at their lunch, on a rare occasion when they chanced to be alone, she told him so, and asked him practically how much he would take to let her divorce him.

      But Vincent Cricklander was a gentleman, and, what is more, an American gentleman, which means of a chivalry towards women unknown in other countries.

      "I do not want any of your money, Cis," he said. "I will be quite glad to go, if it will make you happier. We'll phone T.V. Ryan this afternoon and let him think out a scheme so that it can be done without a scandal of any sort. My mother has old-fashioned ideas, and I would hate to pain the poor dear lady."

      It took nearly two years, but the divorce was completed at last, and Cecilia Cricklander found herself perfectly free and with all the keen scent of the hunter for the chase dilating her fine nostrils as she stood upon the deck of the great ocean liner bound for Liverpool.

      She was a very beautiful woman and refined in every point, with exquisite feet and hands, pure, brilliant, fair coloring and a superb figure, and even a fairly sweet voice. Her education had been a good deal neglected because she was too spoilt by a doting father to profit by the instruction he provided for her. She felt this keenly directly she began to go out into the world, and immediately commenced to remedy the defect. For her, from the very beginning, life appeared in the light of a game. Fate was an adversary from whom she meant to win all the stakes, and it behooved a clever woman not to overlook a single card that might be of use to her in her play. She was quite aware of her own limitations, and her own forces and advantages. She knew she was beautiful and charming; she knew she was kind and generous and extremely "cute," as her old father said. She knew that literature and art did not interest her one atom in themselves, that most music bored her, and that she had a rather imperfect memory; but during her brief visits to England, when she was making up her mind that this country would be the field for her next exertions, she had decided that to be beautiful and charming was not just enough; there were numbers of other Americans who were both, and they were all one as successful and sought after as the other. She must be something beyond this--a real Queen. To beauty and wealth and charm she must add culture as well. She must be able to talk to the prime minister upon his pet foibles, she must be able to quote erudite passages from all the cleverest books of the day to the brilliant politicians and diplomats and men of polished brain who made up the society over which she wished to rule. And how was this to be done? She thought it all out, and during her two years of living quietly to obtain her divorce without a breath of scandal, she had hit upon and put into practice an admirable plan.

      She searched for and found a poor, very plain and highly cultivated English gentlewoman, one who had been governess in a foreign Royal family and was now trying to support an aged mother by giving private lessons. Arabella Clinker was this treasure's name--Miss Arabella Clinker, aged forty-two, and as ugly as it is possible for a thoroughly nice woman to be.

      Mrs. Cricklander made no mysteries about what she required Miss Clinker's companionship for. She explained minutely that should any special dinner-party or _rencontre_ with any great person be in view, Miss Clinker must do a sort of preparatory cramming for her, as boys are prepared for examinations.

      "You must make it your business, when I give you the names of the people I am to meet, to post me up in what they are likely to talk about. You must read all the papers in the morning with the political speeches in them, and then give me a quick _rsum_; if it should be any diplomat or great artist or one of those delightful Englishmen who knows everything, then you must suggest some suitable authors to speak of that they will like, and I have quite enough sense myself to turn the conversation off any that I should not know about. In this way you will soon learn what I require of you, and I shall learn a great deal and gradually can launch out into much more difficult things."

      Arabella Clinker had a sense of humor, and she adored her mother and wished to give her a comfortable old age. Mrs. Cricklander's terms for this unique position were according to her accustomed liberality.

      "I like to give splendid prices for things, and then I expect them to be splendidly done," she said.

      Miss Clinker had promised to do her best, and their partnership had lasted for nearly three years with the most satisfactory results to both of them. Their only difficulty was Mrs. Cricklander's defective memory. She _could not_ learn anything by heart, and if she were at all tired had to keep herself tremendously in hand to make no mistakes. But the three years of constant trying had enabled her to talk upon most subjects in a shibboleth of the world which imposed upon everyone. Her real talent which called for the greatest admiration was the way in which she manipulated what she knew, and skimmed a fresh subject. She would do so with such admirable skill and wording as to give the impression that she was acquainted with its profoundest depths; and then when she was safely over the chasm the first moment she was free she would rush to Arabella for the salient points, doggedly repeat them over and over, and on the next occasion come out with them to the same person, convincing him more than ever of her thorough knowledge of the subject. But her memory was her misfortune, for if Miss Clinker instructed her, for instance, in all the different peculiarities of the styles of Keats and Shelley, a week after she would have forgotten which was which--because both bored her to distraction--and she would have to be reminded again. One awful moment came when, rhapsodizing upon the sensibility of Keats' character, she said to Sir Tedbury Delvine, the finest litterateur of his time, that there must have come moments during Keats' latter years when he must have felt as his own "Prometheus Unbound"! But, seeing her mistake immediately by her listener's blank face, she regained her ground with a skill and a flow of words which made Sir Tedbury Delvine doubt whether his own ears had heard aright.

      "Arabella," Mrs. Cricklander said when next morning she lay smoking in her old-rose silk bed, while she went through her usual lessons for the day, "you must give me just a point each about those wretched old two, so that I will remember them again. I must have a sort of keynote. Shelley's would do with that horrible statue of him drowned, at Oxford, that would connect his chain--but what for Keats?"

      So at last Miss Clinker invented a plan, almost Pythagorean in its way, and it proved very helpful to her patroness.

      When she went on light, amusing excursions to Egypt and such places, she allowed Arabella to remain with her mother, and these were months of pure happiness to Miss Clinker.

      It had not taken Mrs. Cricklander long to conquer London with her money, and her looks, and her triumphant belief in herself. At the end of two years, when John Derringham was first presented to her, she had almost reached the summit of her ambitions. To become his wife she had decided would place her there. For was he not certain to climb to the top of the tree, as well as being the most brilliant and most sought after young man in all England. Of love--the love that recks not of place or gain but just gives its being to the loved one--to such emotion she was happily a complete stranger. John Derringham attracted her greatly, and until now had successfully evaded all her snares and had remained beyond the thrall of her will. To have got him to come for this whole week of Easter was a triumph and exulted her accordingly. She particularly affected politicians, and her house in Grosvenor Square was a meeting-place for both parties, provided the members of СКАЧАТЬ