Only a few days before Ena went north, she was discussing the point with Lilla Braybourne over tea in the latter's drawing-room.
"Women see in every other female thing a potential rival, my dear Lilla," she had said. "That is what makes my task so hard. Every woman defends herself against every other woman, fully confident that the hand of the female world is raised against her."
"I think I agree," was Lilla's reply. "I've hardly ever known a woman to admire the good looks of another of her sex. Curious, isn't it? But it's quite true what you say. Pussies lap tea and scandal everywhere, and even a female saint too often uses her crown of thorns to scratch."
"Yes," laughed the handsome adventuress. "I heard it said the other day that to the woman of thirty the girl of eighteen is a crime, and that to-day's fashion is to look sixteen if you're sixty, and to collar your daughter's lovers if they are not wide awake enough to prevent you. That's what makes it so hard for me."
"Few women can attract women, Ena. You are one of them. You deserve the O.B.E. for it."
"But it is a most difficult and often dangerous undertaking," she declared; "and, after all, the O.B.E. has been given for less."
By the least lapse of the tongue or a too eager appearance to scrape up an acquaintanceship would, Ena knew, alienate Mrs. Morrison for ever. The widow's reverence for her departed husband was the saving clause. She had professed deep sympathy, and in the delightful fiction she had told about her own life and "dear Peter," her late husband, she had attracted Augusta as one of the few women who were womanly.
Who was it said that modern love starts in Heaven and ends in the Sunday newspaper? Ena's philosophy was always amusing. She scoffed at love, at life, at beauty, at everything. Indeed, on that very day as she walked with Mrs. Morrison she had caused her to laugh heartily by referring to some woman friend of hers who lived at Surbiton as "one of those women who shine with virtue and the cheapest sort of complexion soap."
Ena Pollen had a caustic tongue as far as her own sex was concerned, yet she could assume such a suave, sweet manner towards women as entirely to disarm them.
It was so in Mrs. Morrison's case. As the warm, delightful days went on, they were inseparable, exchanging intimate details of their own careers, and fast becoming firm friends.