The Merciless Ladies Read Online Free PDF Page A

ill and had sent a servant to present his apologies. The anti-climax for Elizabeth and Pamela was profound. However, this first bad impression soon wore off. Mr Stafford had a way with him, particularly, it seemed, with young ladies.’
    Later Paul spoke ill of his first commissioned portrait, but I believe it is still in the Bright family home where he painted it. And it made him money and it was a beginning.
    Not that he was remotely out of the wood. It was still his father’s help that kept him above the level of poverty.
    However, that soon changed when he met Diana Marnsett.
II
    The Hon. Mrs Brian Marnsett was the second daughter of Lord Crantell. She had married young – just before the war – and her husband, Colonel Marnsett, twenty years older than herself, was a rich and distinguished man. Apart from being a director of the Westminster Bank and of the White Star shipping line, he owned one of the best art collections in the country and was a notable philanthropist, having bought a number of well-known and valuable pictures for the nation. He was, however, a dull stick, and since the Crantells were still trying to recoup on the third baron’s dissolute extravagances, it was not unnaturally supposed that Diana had married her husband less for love than for money. She confirmed this view by becoming a leader of a smart set which led fashion in London and dispensed patronage to the arts.
    When I first met her, which was a year or so later, I thought her one of the most beautiful women I’d ever seen. Born in India when her father was governor of Bengal, she had brought home with her a certain duskiness under the eyes which contrasted in a marvellous way with the extreme pallor and purity of her skin. She was tall and slender with a mass of fine ebony hair and dark, wide-set eyes that could be either soulful or imperious. Her profile was not so good, and she knew it. People could close their eyes to a suggestion of sharpness here, just as her husband must have closed his eyes to a good deal in her behaviour. She accepted admiration as her right. She had favourites but generally tended to change them quickly. She was a born hostess. When Paul first met her she was thirty.
    It’s quite difficult in this permissive age, when everybody leaps into bed with everyone else – at least, according to the media – when certainly a man and a woman can live together without benefit of clergy and no one really lifts an eyebrow to judge, to remember a state of affairs where, in spite of the emancipating effects of the bloodiest war in history, morality was only slowly shifting its values away from the rigid codes of the Victorian age. Of course there was a lot of immorality – if that is a word that can still be used – as there has been at all times – but it had to be hidden, kept quietly under cover, not flaunted or publicized. If it was so publicized it could still do a great deal of harm, to one’s social life, to one’s financial expectations, to one’s actual career.
    Paul at this time was involved with Mary Compton – one of the two girls I had met on that first visit to him in London – but to what lengths I have no means of knowing, and Mary Compton, who married shortly afterwards, clearly never had any wish to say more about it. Her attachment with Paul broke soon after he met Diana.
    Diana Marnsett’s interest in Paul was immediate. Through her husband and some of her friends she knew enough about painting to see his obvious talents; and, to a woman jaded with the attentions of smooth young gentlemen, his blunt, uncompromising maleness must have made a special appeal.
    He had not known her a month when she offered him the advice that it would pay him to have some of these rough corners ‘ rounded off’. There was an elocutionist in Hanover Square: a couple of lessons a week would make all the difference. Her husband’s tailor in Cork Street