A Most Immoral Woman Read Online Free PDF Page B

against her bodice. ‘Dullness is a terrible crime against society, don’t you agree, Dr Morrison?’
    ‘Certainly. And please, call me Ernest.’
    ‘Then you must call me Mae.’ She studied him for a moment and smiled wistfully. ‘You remind me of someone, Ernest. Someone back home.’
    ‘I hope it is someone you care for and not the opposite,’ he said, awkward as a lad.
    A cloud passed briefly over her eyes. ‘I shall tell you about him another time.’ She looked up again, her expression impenetrable.
    Morrison simultaneously darkened at the thought of this mysterious other and brightened at the promise held out by her use of the future tense. He recalled Dumas mentioning something about a scandal. His imagination threw up several florid scenarios. All involved some version of a passionate deflowering and its aftermath. He concluded that this would not be a bad antecedent. To the contrary, it was ideal. The consequences of seducing the virgin daughter of an upstanding, wealthy and prominent family were not worth thinking about. Oh pray God, do not let her be a virgin. In the next instant, he berated himself for his presumption.
    ‘A penny for your thoughts.’
    Her eyes, he felt, were already unwrapping them. ‘Oh, I was…I was just reflecting on the latest developments in the war.’ Pompous! Stupid!
    ‘I did not expect you to say that. But Martin—Mr Egan—has told me that you are a great booster of the Japanese cause.’
    ‘That I am. The Japs won the Liaotung Peninsula fair and square in the Sino-Japanese War eight years ago. It was wrong for the Chinese to lease Port Arthur to the Russians.’
    ‘Is it not their port to lease to whomever they like?’ She shook her head. One curl came loose, momentarily mesmerising Morrison with its languid sway. ‘I don’t know much about it but I can’t help feeling that war is rarely a good thing. If I hear of a ship sunk in battle, all I can think about are the poor sailors who sank with it.’
    ‘Women are natural pacifists. But sometimes there’s good reason for war. Your own President Roosevelt once said he’s notsensitive about killing, as long as the reason is adequate.’ Her ears, he noticed, were exquisite—delicate shells the colour of cream.
    ‘I know you are a brave and proven man, Dr Morrison—Ernest—so I don’t mean this personally. But it has been my experience that it is normally men not themselves called to battle who maintain the most zealous appetite for war. I have known good, brave boys from the Mount Tamalpais Academy who burned with desire to serve their country as officers and gentlemen. Those who had the chance rarely returned with the same lustre about them. My own dear brother Fred nearly didn’t come home at all from the Spanish-American War—and for what? For people like the Nisbets to go tormenting our new subjects with their dreary pieties?’
    Here was a lively one! Morrison’s last lover, the customs official’s wife, had proven insufferably insipid when they finally got around to talking. It had not been an isolated experience, and went some way towards explaining his enduring bachelorhood. ‘I admire the moral sentiment that drives your argument,’ he said. ‘Yet some wars are just and necessary. Your own Civil War, whilst brutal, did end slavery and maintain the unity of the nation.’
    ‘True,’ she said, her tone conciliatory. ‘So the Russo-Japanese War would, in your opinion, be a righteous war?’
    ‘Most definitely,’ he answered with gusto. ‘The British Empire has brought good governance and peace to backwards and downtrodden peoples wherever it has touched them. Japan’s constitutional monarchy, which subscribes to the values of the Enlightenment, has similar ambitions.’
    ‘You are very passionate about this.’
    ‘Truth be told, if there had been no war, I would repine that my whole work in China had been a failure.’ What had begun as aflirtatious conversation was in danger of turning