the greatest beauties and perhaps the sternest prude in
England. She wrote me, soon after that unbelievable mating: "I have
married Cecil Grimshaw. I know you won't approve; I do not altogether
approve myself. He is not like the men I have known--not at all
_English_. But he intrigues me; there is a sense of power behind his
awfulness--you see I know that he is awful! I think I will be able to
make him look at things--I mean visible, material things--my way. We
have taken a house in town and he has promised to behave--no more
Chelsea parties, no dancers, no yellow waistcoats and chrysanthemums.
That was all very well for his 'student' days. Now that he is a
personage, it will scarcely do. I am tremendously interested and
happy...."

Interested and happy! She was a typical product of Victoria's reign, a
beautiful creature whose faith was pinned to the most unimportant
things--class, position, a snobbish religion, a traditional morality
and her own place in an intricate little world of ladies and
gentlemen. God save us! What was Cecil Grimshaw going to do in an
atmosphere of titled bores, bishops, military men, and cautious
statesmen? I could fancy him in his new town house, struggling through
some endless dinner party--his cynical, stone-gray eyes sweeping up
and down the table, his lips curled in that habitual sneer, his mind,
perhaps, gone back to the red-and-blue room in Chelsea, where he had
been wont to stand astride before the black mantel, bellowing
indecencies into the ears of witty modernists. Could he bellow any
longer?

Apparently not. I heard of him now and then from this friend and that.
He was indeed "behaving" well. He wrote nothing to shock the
sensibilities of his wife's world--a few fantastic short stories,
touched with a certain childish spirituality, and that was all. They
say that he bent his manners to hers--a tamed centaur grazing with a
milk-white doe. He grew a trifle fat. Quite like a model English
husband, he called Dagmar "My dear" and drove with her in the Park at
the fashionable hour, his hands crossed on the head of his cane, his
eyes half closed. She wrote me: "I am completely happy. So is Cecil.
Surely he can have made no mistake in marrying me."

You all know that this affectation of respectability did not last
long--not more than five years; long enough for the novelty to wear
off. The genius or the devil that was in Cecil Grimshaw made its
reappearance. He was tossed out of Dagmar