n actress; but,
after much effort, found that only her voice and the perfect preservation
of her legs were appreciated by the discerning managers and public of
South Africa; and for three chequered years she made face against fortune
with the help of them, under an assumed name. What she did--keeping a
certain bloom of refinement, was far better than the achievements of many
more respectable ladies in her shoes. At least she never bemoaned her
"reduced circumstances," and if her life was irregular and had at least
three episodes, it was very human. She bravely took the rough with the
smooth, never lost the power of enjoying herself, and grew in sympathy
with the hardships of others. But she became deadly tired. When the war
broke out, remembering that she was a good nurse, she took her real name
again and a change of occupation. For one who liked to please men, and
to be pleased by them, there was a certain attraction about that life in
war-time; and after two years of it she could still appreciate the way
her Tommies turned their heads to look at her when she passed their beds.
But in a hard school she had learned perfect self-control; and though the
sour and puritanical perceived her attraction, they knew her to be
forty-three. Besides, the soldiers liked her; and there was little
trouble in her wards. The war moved her in simple ways; for she was
patriotic in the direct fashion of her class. Her father had been a
sailor, her husbands an official and a soldier; the issue for her was
uncomplicated by any abstract meditation. The Country before everything!
And though she had tended during those two years so many young wrecked
bodies, she had taken it as all in the a day's work, lavishing her
sympathy on the individual, without much general sense of pity and waste.
Yes, she had worked really hard, had "done her bit"; but of late she had
felt rising within her the old vague craving for "life," for pleasure,
for something more than the mere negative admiration bestowed on her by
her "Tommies." Those old letters--to look them through them had been a
sure sign of this vague craving--had sharpened to poignancy the feeling
that life was slipping away from her while she was still comely. She had
been long out of England, and so hard-worked since she came back that
there were not many threads she could pick up suddenly. Two letters out
of that little budget of the past, with a far cry between them, had
awakened within