“Now you’ll take my advice,” said Mrs. Fisher, touched, “and not neglect what may very well turn into an illness.  We are in Italy, you know, and one has to be careful.  You ought, to begin with, to go to bed.”

“I never go to bed,” snapped Scrap; and it sounded as moving, as forlorn, as that line spoken years and years ago by an actress playing the part of Poor Jo in dramatized version of Bleak House—­“I’m always moving on,” said Poor Jo in this play, urged to do so by a policeman; and Mrs. Fisher, then a girl, had laid her head on the red velvet parapet of the front row of the dress circle and wept aloud.

It was wonderful, Scrap’s voice.  It had given her, in the ten years since she came out, all the triumphs that intelligence and wit can have, because it made whatever she said seem memorable.  She ought, with a throat formation like that, to have been a singer, but in every kind of music Scrap was dumb except this one music of the speaking voice; and what a fascination, what a spell lay in that.  Such was the liveliness of her face and the beauty of her colouring that there was not a man into whose eyes at the sight of her there did not leap a flame of intensest interest; but, when he heard her voice, the flame in that man’s eyes was caught and fixed.  It was the same with every man, educated and uneducated, old, young, desirable themselves or undesirable, men of her own world and bus-conductors, generals and Tommies—­during the war she had had a perplexing time—­bishops equally with vergers—­round about her confirmation startling occurrences had taken place—­wholesome and unwholesome, rich and penniless, brilliant or idiotic; and it made no difference at all what they were, or how long and securely married:  into the eyes of every one of them, when they saw her, leapt this flame, and when they heard her it stayed there.

Scrap had had enough of this look.  It only led to difficulties.  At first it had delighted her.  She had been excited, triumphant.  To be apparently incapable of doing or saying the wrong thing, to be applauded, listened to, petted, adored wherever she went, and when she came home to find nothing there either but the most indulgent proud fondness—­why, how extremely pleasant.  And so easy, too.  No preparation necessary for this achievement, no hard work, nothing to learn.  She need take no trouble.  She had only to appear, and presently say something.

But gradually experiences gathered round her.  After all, she had to take trouble, she had to make efforts, because, she discovered with astonishment and rage, she had to defend herself.  That look, that leaping look, meant that she was going to be grabbed at.  Some of those who had it were more humble than others, especially if they were young, but they all, according to their several ability, grabbed; and she who had entered the world so jauntily, with her head in the air and the completest confidence in anybody whose hair was grey, began to distrust,