Confessions of a Well-Meaning Woman
before, where the money came from, if there was any money—not a word! To this day I don’t know whether she hailed from Paraguay or Venezuela. . .
“She is a widow,” I was able to tell Will; and indeed I took great pains to scotch these ridiculous stories which had been swirling round London when I left. It was cruel that any one should say such things of any woman; and, if my boy ever thought fit to drop the handkerchief, I did not want to have any explaining-away to do. She was greatly attracted to him, and I fancy that the one doubt in his mind was the immense difference in blood and breeding: Roman Catholic (I presume; I have no certain knowledge even of that) and Anglican, Latin and Anglo-Saxon . . . and so forth and so on. We really knew so very little about her that my boy prudently and properly did not seek to press his advantage with her prematurely. . .
I sometimes feel that in London one uproots one lie only to make room for another. A few days’ “propaganda”, as Will would say, convinced people that “the mystery woman”, as some one christened her, had no homicidal husband lurking with a revolver behind the nearest bush. But a different story beeame wide-spread . . . indeed, universally repeated and almost universally believed. The old story, I should
147
