They Found Him Dead Read Free

upon the rejected footstool and said: "I simply must tell you what Peter said to me when I told him I was going to Uncle Silas' birthday-party! You know the children always call him Uncle. They absolutely worship him. But of course he's simply marvellous with children, isn't he? I mean, he has a kind of way with them. I suppose it's a sort of magnetism. I always notice how they go to him. I mean, even a shy mite like my Jennifer. It's as though she just can't help herself."
    This portrait of her son drawn in the guise of some kind of boa constrictor did not appear to afford Emily any marked degree of gratification. She said dampingly: "And what did Peter say?"
    "Oh God!" muttered Rosemary and, jerking herself up out of a deep chair, walked across the room towards Miss Allison and suggested to her that they should go into the conservatory.
    Miss Allison realised with a slight sinking of the heart that she was to be made the recipient of confidences.
    Mrs. Clement Kane had some few months before suddenly taken what appeared to be a strong liking to her and had signified it by recounting to her with remarkable frankness her various emotional crises.
    "What a Godforsaken party!" Rosemary ejaculated as soon as she was out of Emily's ear-shot. "I can't think how you manage to put up with living here day in day out."
    Miss Allison considered this. "It isn't as bad as you might imagine," she said. "In fact, it's really rather a pleasant life, taken all round."
    Rosemary looked at her in wondering dismay. "But the utter boredom!" she said. "I should go mad."
    "Yes, but I'm rather placid, you know," replied Miss Allison apologetically.
    "I envy you. Cigarette?"
    Miss Allison accepted one.
    "It must be great to be able to take what comes, as you do," pursued Rosemary. "I wish I were like it. But it's no good blinking facts: I'm not."
    "Well, I don't say that I should choose to be anyone's companion," said Miss Allison. "Only I'm a fool at shorthand and have no talents."
    "I expect you have, really," said Rosemary in an absent voice and with her gaze fixed broodingly upon a spray of heliotrope. "I told you I was getting to the end of my tether, didn't I? Well, I believe I've reached the end."
    There did not seem to be anything to say in answer to this. Miss Allison tried to look sympathetic.
    "The ironic part of it is that having me doesn't make Clement happy," said Rosemary. "Really he'd be better off without me. I don't think I'm the sort of person who ought ever to marry. I'm probably a courtesan manquée. You see, I know myself so frightfully well—I think that's my Russian blood coming out."
    "I didn't know you had any," remarked Miss Allison, mildly interested.
    "Good God, yes! My grandfather was a Russian. I say, do you mind if I call you Patricia?"
    "Not at all," said Miss Allison politely.
    "And please call me Rosemary. You don't know how I hate that ghastly 'Mrs. Kane.' There's only one thing worse, and that's 'Mrs. Clement.'" She threw away her half-smoked cigarette and added with a slight smile: "I suppose I sound a perfect brute to you? I am, of course. I know that. You mustn't think I don't see my own faults. I know I'm selfish, capricious, extravagant and fatally discontented. And the worst of it is that I'm afraid that's part of my nature, and even if I go away with Trevor, which seems to me now the only way I can ever be happy, it won't last."
    "Well, in that case you'd far better stick to your husband," said Miss Allison sensibly.
    Rosemary sighed. "You don't understand. I wasn't born to this humdrum life in a one-eyed town, surrounded by in-laws, with never enough money, and the parlour-maid always giving notice, and all that sort of ghastly sordidness. At least I shouldn't have that if I went away with Trevor. We should probably live abroad, and anyway he would never make the fatal mistake of expecting me to cope with butcher's bills. It isn't that I won't do it, it's simply that I can't. I'm not made like that. I'm