The Bohemian Girl by Frances Vernon Page B

whose silk-weaving family had once owned one of the best houses in Folegate Street, Spitalfields, and that, though her father was a tailor, one of her great-great-grandfathers had been a professor at the university of Heidelberg, Edward did not believe her. He smiled indulgently at her, and preferred to think that she was a pure London urchin, even though she did not talk like one. Edward imagined that he would spread many different rumours about Kitty round London, when his marriage was known. Her own story would do for one, but he would tell some of his more liberal-theoried friends that she was a workhouse child, others that she was part Lascar, and more that she was the natural daughter of some distantly hinted-at eminent man.
    Kitty did not introduce Edward to any of her relations, most of whom disapproved of her being on the stage and thought that only trouble could come of her marriage to apeer’s son, if her marriage was a true one at all and he was not a deceiver. She knew that her people would have to be dropped, and Edward quite agreed with her.
    Sometimes Kitty herself could not wholly believe in her marriage. This was partly because it was of course so extraordinary that she, Nellie Rosenthal, truly was to be a baroness and the mistress of Dunstanton Park, and partly because, after fifteen years, she had found a man who was not only a peer, who would marry her, but a darling boy whom she could adore. There was a third and slightly less agreeable reason for her irrational doubt: Kitty had spent these first six months of her marriage living more like a mistress than a wife.
    She did not share Edward’s rooms off St James’s Street, but lived in a rented house in Brompton Square which was considerably drearier than most kept mistresses’ establishments. It was the financial strain of keeping two places in London on a bachelor’s allowance which, a few days ago, had enabled Kitty to persuade her husband that it was time, at last, for his family to know.
    Kitty studied her face in the bedroom mirror and narrowed her eyes, as she waited for Edward’s return from Queen Anne’s Gate, and imagined the Blenthams all together. She was wearing a silk dressing-gown over elaborate stays, and as she brushed her hair she sang, with the impertinent air of doubt her husband loved:
    Hearts just as pure and fair
    May beat in Belgrave Square
    As in the lowly air
    Of Seven Dials.
    Then she stuck her tongue out at the mirror and said: ‘Ya!’ Such vulgarities did not come quite naturally to her, but they were amusing.
    Kitty’s face was often called amusing, enchanting, impish, but above all lovely. Edward said she looked quite deliciously the girl of the period. She had little parted lips, discreetly noticeable white teeth, very big tilted hazel eyes, and waving hair which was almost black. Her nose was retroussé, her chinpointed, and her only fault was a slightly sallow complexion which a dab of rouge could entirely cure. She photographed very well, and she favoured big elaborate dresses, ostrich feathers and furs, for such things made her look like a wonderfully promising girl-child, although she was thirty-one.
    Suddenly as she was twisting her hair up, a flicker of evening sunlight made Kitty lean forward and examine her face in detail. There was a tiny, soft crack between her nostril and the corner of her mouth: another two under her eyes. She looked up fearfully at the photograph of herself in white lace which had once been publicly for sale. It had been taken nine years ago at a high point in her career, before she quarrelled with the manager of the Gaiety Theatre. Kitty tried to think that she had not aged at all; then remembered that she was very good for her age in spite of her little lines of character, and that she was married and retired besides.
    Just as she was thinking that one day she might miss the stage, which was by no means so immoral as Lady Blentham thought, else she would never have become an actress