Poor Caroline Read Online Free PDF Page A

Casino and she is there. I go to the Hotel de Paris and she is there. I go down to the beach and she is there, arising from the waves like a slightly over-ripened
    Aphrodite. If I take the wings of the morning and fly to the uttermost parts of the earth, she will be there also, dying to tell me a perfectly screaming limerick about a young lady called Hilda who had an affair with a builder.'
    He mimicked with such observant malice Madame Cal mier's deep, laughing voice that Wing Stretton accepted his derision as bona fide evidence of his untroubled heart, and left him alone to avoid his own entanglements.
    But Basil did not tell Wing Stretton the other confidences which Madame Calmier had entrusted to him, though they were infinitely more amusing than the limerick about the young lady called Hilda. For Madame Calmier had no in hibitions. Her candour shocked almost as much as her egotism astounded him. She took for granted his desire to know all that could be told about her past, and talked of herself with unaffected enjoyment.
    During their second meeting she informed him that her name was not Gloria at all, but Gladys Irene Mabel. Gladys Irene Mabel Wilcox - 'Well, what could you do with a name like that?' said she. 'When I went on the stage I changed it to Gloria. Gloria Wilcox went quite well, and I kept the Wilcox just to spite Dad because I knew he'd throw fits if they ever found out in Peterborough that he had a daughter in the chorus.'
    Her father had been a solicitor's clerk in Peterborough, but Gladys Irene Mabel had found her style unsuited to cathedral cities. When just sixteen she was expelled from the High School for an outrageous flirtation with the grocer's assistant who played the part of 'Fairfax' in an amateur performance of The Teaman of the Guard. 'An awful little man he was really. Short legs, you know, and wore a bowler hat and said, "Pleased to meet you," though that wouldn't have troubled me then. For if he was common, so was I, thank heaven. There's some virtue in vulgarity that swings you over the hard places when you're young. He had a nice tenor voice, though, and I was crazy about the stage. I tried to make him run away with me to London, but he was much too pure. In fact, you know, my first attempt at seduction was a wash-out. He married an elementary school teacher and sings solos in the choir and has seven children. Oh well.'
    But Gloria-Gladys, since she could not persuade the young man to accompany her to London, went there alone, and encountered such adventures in that city as are commonly supposed to occur to stage-struck girls of sixteen from the provinces. She found, to her dismay, that she was thought too tall for the chorus. She walked on in pantomime as one of Dick Whittington's young men friends in green tights and a leather jerkin, and she eventually crossed to America with a vaudeville producer in a capacity never clearly denned by contract. She sold cigarettes in the foyer of a New York hotel. She acted as hostess in a dance saloon. She displayed models as an outsize mannequin in a Chicago dress store, and in Rio de Janeiro she bore a child, which died, to an Italian real-estate agent whom she had met in Illinois. Dur ing the war she returned to Europe with an extremely resp ectable semi-amateur concert party under the auspices of the American Y.M.C.A.
    The concert party went to Paris and there she met Gaston Calmier, a childless widower, no longer very young, the son of a Lyons silk merchant. He was a gentle, ineffective little man, but Gloria liked him, and when, in a panic of loneli ness before he was finally called up to join his reserve regiment, he asked her to marry him, she accepted even before she knew that he had a small but pleasant fortune, carefully invested. 'A nice little man. He wouldn't have hurt a chicken. And he was killed six weeks after he'd reached the front. It was murder to send little creatures like him to fight. Well - life being what it is, perhaps it was