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She would take Smithie to theatres and out to lunch and talk interminably of the business, and Smithie became a sort of permanent weekender with us. Also Marion got a spaniel and began to dabble with the minor arts, with poker-work and a Kodak and hyacinths in glasses. She called once on a neighbour.
Into my memory of these pains and stresses comes the figure of Smithie, full-charged with emotion, so breathless in the presence of the horrid villain of the piece that she could make no articulate sounds. She had long tearful confidences with Marion, I know, sympathetic close clingings.
Smithie, and the Misses Smithie, was the next announcement. 'What's Mr. Smithie? inquired Mr. Tracy Tupman. 'Something in the yard, replied the stranger. Mr. Smithie bowed deferentially to Sir Thomas Clubber; and Sir Thomas Clubber acknowledged the salute with conscious condescension. Lady Clubber took a telescopic view of Mrs. Smithie and family through her eye-glass and Mrs.
Then I damned at Smithie, and wrote a card to Marion. "Dear Marion," I said, "how goes it?" She astonished me tremendously by telling me she had married again "a Mr. Wachorn, a leading agent in the paper-pattern trade."
They got very muddy and dull; Mr. Ramboat killed a cow by improper feeding, and that disheartened them all. A twelvemonth saw the enterprise in difficulties. I had to help her out of this, and then they returned to London and she went into partnership with Smithie at Streatham, and ran a business that was intimated on the firm's stationery as "Robes."
There were times when she seemed to regard our separation with absolute complacency, when she would plan all sorts of freedoms and characteristic interests. "I shall go out a lot with Smithie," she said. And once she said an ugly thing that I did indeed hate her for that I cannot even now quite forgive her. "Your aunt will rejoice at all this. She never cared for me..."
Her hats were startling and various, but invariably disconcerting, and she talked in a rapid, nervous flow that was hilarious rather than witty, and broken by little screams of "Oh, my dear!" and "you never did!" She was the first woman I ever met who used scent. Poor old Smithie! What a harmless, kindly soul she really was, and how heartily I detested her!
There was a case of stealing at Smithie's, and many tears. Smithie I met before we were married, and afterwards she became a frequent visitor to our house at Ealing. She was a thin, bright-eyed, hawk-nosed girl of thirtyodd, with prominent teeth, a high-pitched, eager voice and a disposition to be urgently smart in her dress.
We talked a little language together whence were "friends," and I was "Mutney" and she was "Ming," and we kept up such an outward show that till the very end Smithie thought our household the most amiable in the world. I cannot tell to the full how Marion thwarted me and failed in that life of intimate emotions which is the kernel of love.
Her worst offence for me was an occasional excursion into the Smithie style of dressing, debased West Kensington. For she had no sense at all of her own beauty. She had no comprehension whatever of beauty of the body, and she could slash her beautiful lines to rags with hat-brims and trimmings.
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