As the weather, in the last days of October, became cooler and more stimulating, Lady Muriel began to experience a series of startling sensations. She felt excited, and her mind turned itself to a heated study of the romantic possibilities of existence at the Residency. She had always been told that a young woman’s life was divided into two distinct ages, the first being a period filled with romantic episodes and terminated by marriage, and the second being a period crowded with very serious love affairs and only curtailed by age or the divorce court.
So far she could safely say that she had only been in love three times. Once at Eastbourne, during her school-days, she had fallen into a divine frenzy over a curate, who had been a rugger blue at Oxford, and who, in a certain brief and desperate sofa-episode, had apparently mistaken her for the football with which he was touching down a try, but who, a moment later, had recovered his feet and had staggered out into the night calling upon God for mercy upon a married man. She had nursed her bruises and had sorrowed for him for many days, ardently desiring to poison his wife and all her babies, but his sudden appointment to a far-away living had closed the story.
A year later she fell in love with a Russian singer who, at the time, was being heavily lionized in London; but, as luck would have it, she met three of his mistresses in one day, and the fright sobered her.
The third episode had been much more prosaic. The man was merely a young Member of Parliament who made his overtures in the most approved style, and might have succeeded in capturing her, had it not been discovered on the day the engagement was to be announced that he had borrowed money on the strength of the coming alliance. In this case she had not grieved for long: indeed, when she happened to see him a week later she had already sufficiently recovered to observe that his eyes were set too close together, his teeth were like a rabbit’s, his hands too hairy, his head not hairy enough, and his legs bandy.
That was a year ago, and since then she had been entirely heart-whole. Now, however, the starry Egyptian nights, the sun-bathed days, the multitude of officers, officials, and diplomats whose acquaintance she was making, and the general court paid to her, both as a charming woman and as the Great Man’s daughter, were beginning to stimulate her senses.