It was an effect of these things that from the very first, with every one listening, I could mention that my main business with her would be just to have a go at her head and to arrange in that view for an early sitting.

It would have been as impossible, I think, to be impertinent to her as it would have been to throw a stone at a plate-glass window; so any talk that went forward on the basis of her loveliness was the most natural thing in the world and immediately became the most general and sociable.

It was when I saw all this that I judged how, though it was the last thing she asked for, what one would ever most have at her service was a curious compassion.

That sentiment was coloured by the vision of the dire exposure of a being whom vanity had put so off her guard.

Hers was the only vanity I have ever known that made its possessor superlatively soft.
Mrs.Meldrum's further information contributed moreover to these indulgences--her account of the girl's neglected childhood and queer continental relegations, with straying squabbling Monte-Carlo-haunting parents; the more invidious picture, above all, of her pecuniary arrangement, still in force, with the Hammond Synges, who really, though they never took her out--practically she went out alone--had their hands half the time in her pocket.