Fog of Doubt Read Online Free PDF Page B

her—er—lover had been French. In fact, he was still on the continent now, which was one of the troubles.…
    â€˜You’d think these Frogs would be up to all the dodges and not land themselves in these messes, wouldn’t you?’ said the advocate for unmarried motherhood.
    So there was nothing left for it. Rosie told Melissa.
    Melissa was the daughter of a rather old old girl at Matilda’s convent school; and Matilda, who was habitually more kind than she was sensible, gave her a small salary and the use of the flat in the basement of the house in Maida Vale, in consideration of some help in the kitchen and attendance upon old Mrs. Evans. She was a thin, nervous girl with a crowning glory of curly nut-brown hair, of which one lock was for ever falling forward over her right eye to the infinite irritation of all beholders and the great satisfaction of Melissa herself, who practised in the looking-glass tossing her head back and immediately letting the lock fall forward again. At twenty-two, she remained an adolescent; unloving and unloved, introspective, dissatisfied, tortured with uncertainty about her future should she fail to ‘get married’. Men and marriage were indeed, and rightly, all she ever thought about, and she was consumed with envy for the careless rapture of Rosie’s easy-going carryings-on; so much so that even the guilelessly unsuspecting heart of Miss Evans had been vaguely aware that all between them was not entirely well. Now, however, bereft of other friends, she was forced back upon Melissa’s mercy, and she curled herself up on the rather grubby off-white cushions on the divan in the basement flat and asked with elaborate carelessness if Melissa happened to know of a nice, cheap, quackified abortionist. ‘Because it’s too boring, but I seem to have gone and got myself in the family way. These Continentals are so ardent, aren’t they? There’s no resisting them.’
    Melissa had spent a couple of terms at a convent in Brussels and on the strength of it wrote her sevens with little dashes through them and was frequently at a loss for the English word; but her experience with ‘Continentals’ was absolutely nil, as indeed—though not for want of increasingly desperate trying as she approached her twenty-third year and began to fear ‘the shelf’—was her experience of any other breed of men. She produced a little notebook, however, and riffled through the pages, in search of the numerous abortionists whom she and her friends purported to patronize. The names appeared to have got themselves mixed up with those of more innocent entries, however, and, after much searching, she still could not lay her finger upon one working practitioner to whom Rosie, in her extremity, might resort. They fell to boasting to each other of their conquests instead; and which was the more to be pitied might be in doubt—she who had already had too many, or she who had had none.
    And yet, that last was not strictly true; for some weeks ago, while Rosie was still in Switzerland, Melissa, having read in a woman’s magazine that the way to make new friends was to go in for indoor skating and contrive to take a tumble (thus figuratively at any rate breaking the ice) had duly skated and duly fallen, though only in the literal sense; but literally and figuratively both, had duly been ‘picked up’. She, too, had led her victim home for a nice cup of tea, but unlike Rosie had emerged unscathed; for despite the great nonsense she talked Melissa was the soul and body of respectability. She had, however, clung tightly to the young man, intriguing him with a wealth of phoney mystery, ‘playing hard to get’, hinting at depthless passions, reverting before his very eyes to an icy chill. He, older and far the more experienced of the two, played the same game and beat her at it hollow, and enjoyed himself enormously.
    â€˜He sounds too