odwood, the misfortune
of Camille de Valenciennes who had gone off to Carlsbad with a barber
who said he was a Russian prince and had left her there stranded.

Her experiences piled up, and, after a few weeks she found she had
exhausted most of the types who frequented the Vesuvius. Most of them
were of the gawky kind, being very young men out for the night and
desperately anxious to get off on the quiet by three o'clock in the
morning; of the gawky kind too were the Manchester merchants paying a
brief visit to town on business and who wanted a peep into the inferno;
these were easily dealt with and, if properly primed with champagne,
exceedingly generous. Now and then Victoria was confronted with a racier
type which tended to become rather brutal. It was recruited largely from
obviously married men whose desires, dammed and sterilised by monotonous
relations, seemed suddenly to burst their bonds.

In a few weeks her resources developed exceedingly. She learned the
scientific look that awakes a man's interest: a droop of the eyelid
followed by a slow raising of it, a dilation of the pupil, then again a
demure droop and the suspicion of a smile. She learned to prime herself
from the papers with the proper conversation; racing, the latest divorce
news, ragging scandals, marriages of the peerage into the chorus. She
learned to laugh at chestnuts and to memorise such stories as sounded
fresh; a few judicious matinees put her up to date as to the latest
musical comedies. On the whole it was an easy life enough. Six hours in
the twenty-four seemed sufficient to afford her a good livelihood, and
she did not doubt that by degrees she would make herself a connection
which might be turned to greater advantage; as it was she had two
faithful admirers whom she could count on once a week.

The life itself often struck her as horrible, foul; still she was
getting inured to the inane and could listen to it with a tolerant
smile; sometimes she looked dispassionately into men's fevered eyes with
a little wonder and an immense satisfaction in her power and the value
of her beauty. Sometimes a thrill of hatred went through her and she
loathed those whose toy she was; then she felt tempted to drink, to
drugs, to anything that would deaden the nausea; but she would rally:
the first night, when she had drunk deep of champagne after the kummel,
had given her a racking headache and suggested that beauty does not
thrive on mixed drinks.

An