r freedom from the ordinary
social ties began to amuse her. She had now so much time for all sorts
of things which women very much in society miss more often than
not. Never going to parties, she was able to go elsewhere. She went
elsewhere. Always there had dwelt caged in her a certain wildness which
did not come from her English blood. There was a foreign strain in
her from the borders of Asia mingled with a strong Celtic strain. This
wildness which in her girlhood she had let loose happily in games and
sports, in violent flirtations, and in much daring skating over thin
ice, which in her married life had spent itself in the whirl of society,
and in the energies necessary to the attainment of an unchallenged
position at the top of things, in her widowhood began to seek an outlet
in Bohemia.

Paris can be a very kind or a very cruel city, in its gaiety hiding
velvet or the claws of a tiger. To Lady Sellingworth--then Lady
Manham--it was kind. It gave her its velvet. She knew a fresh type
of life there, with much for the intellect, with not a little for the
senses, even with something for the heart. It was there that she visited
out-of-the-way cafes, where clever men met and talked over every subject
on earth. A place like the Cafe Royal in London had no attraction for
the Lady Sellingworth over sixty. That sort of thing, raised to the
_nth_ degree, had been familiar to her years and years ago, before Beryl
Van Tuyn and Enid Blunt had been in their cradles.

And the freedom of her widowhood, with no tie at all, had become
gradually very dear to her. She had felt free enough in her marriage.
But this manner of life had more breathing space in it. There is no
doubt that in that Paris year, especially in the second half of it, she
allowed the wild strain in her to play as it had never played before,
like a reckless child out of sight of parents and all relations.

When the mourning was over and she returned to London she was a woman
who had progressed, but whether upon an upward or a downward path who
shall decide? She had certainly become more fascinating. Her beauty was
at its height. The year in Paris, lived almost wholly among clever and
very unprejudiced French people, had given her a peculiar polish--one
Frenchman who knew English slang called it "a shine"--which made her
stand out among her English contemporaries. Many of them when girls had
received a "finish" in Paris. But girls cannot go about as she had gone