Tales of the uneasy

She would be no poorer, it was not that. She was an orphan, and all her mother had had came to her. That meant seventy thousand pounds, plate, linen and the freehold of a fine old house in Lower Seymour Street, that they had moved into a year before the old lady died. Things were no more altered socially than they were altered pecuniarily, for the Damers’ set naturally corresponded, as sets do, with their postal district, and Miss Alice Damer could therefore continue to command an entrance into the best circles. Only she realized that she must henceforth enjoy all these good things to the tune of a paid companion, having no poor and amenable relations handy whom she could draft into the household economy, and afterwards snub into a colourless, bare existence. She was thirty-five, and her years did not weigh on her, except mentally. The first faint physical signs of the debacle were, so far, evident to herself alone, and then only in moods of unusual depression. She was still young enough to need a companion. Her pretty red-gold hair was as red as gold, as pretty as ever, her visits to her dentist as few, her eyes as deep, and her step as elastic, although she had given up dancing. She had made this sacrifice more from a sense of fitness, as a concession to the needs of the young girls coming up all round her, and who deserved their turn on the floor, than of social necessity. As a matter of fact, she had never been really fond of that over-energetic, disordering form of amusement. She loved the world and going up and down in it immensely, and her way of enjoying parties was to sit out if it was a dance, away from the music if it was a concert, and in the back of the box if it was a play. She was a flirt. Not an outrageous, noisy, ill-bred flirt, but what is known as a quiet flirt, with many strong and efficient strings to her bow. Did one of them, being after all only catgut or mere man, snap occasionally—that is to say, get married out of the circle of her charm—Alice, in her quiet way, promptly renewed the string, and supplied herself with a new admirer, as good at fetching and carrying as the old. In her mind