and crowded chairs—­I became aware both that protection was wholly absent from her life and that she was wholly indifferent to its absence.  The odd thing was that she was not appealing:  she was abjectly, divinely conceited, absurdly fantastically pleased.  Her beauty was as yet all the world to her, a world she had plenty to do to live in.  Mrs. Meldrum told me more about her, and there was nothing that, as the centre of a group of giggling, nudging spectators, Flora wasn’t ready to tell about herself.  She held her little court in the crowd, upon the grass, playing her light over Jews and Gentiles, completely at ease in all promiscuities.  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.  She had to pay for everything, down to her share of the wine-bills and the horses’ fodder, down to Bertie Hammond Synge’s fare in the “underground” when he went to the City for her.  She had been left with just money enough to turn her head; and it hadn’t even been put in trust, nothing prudent or proper had been done with it.  She could spend her capital, and at the rate she was going, expensive, extravagant and with a swarm of parasites to help, it certainly wouldn’t last very long.

“Couldn’t you perhaps take her, independent, unencumbered as you are?” I asked of Mrs. Meldrum.  “You’re probably, with one exception, the sanest person she knows, and you at least wouldn’t scandalously fleece her.”