The Romantic Lady

Noel Anson and I had been great friends in our first youthful days but our lives and ambitions had led us so contrarily that we had not seen each other for more than six years when on the night two weeks ago we happened to meet at the Club. We had both of course so much to say that as often happens we babbled on quite inartistically spoiling many a good story in the gay breathless exchange of reminiscence and experience; from all of which however clearly loomed out these great cardinal facts of our lives that we had both married; my wife who was a perfect woman I explained I had had to leave behind in New Zealand to take care of her old father; while his wife who was also a perfect woman he chivalrously insisted had thought fit to divorce poor Noël some six months before.. 12 But there was one story anyway which Noël Anson did not hurriedly spoil. He kept it long inside him—until that hour after ten when our corner of the smoking-room was entirely our own and until he safely knew that I had talked enough to be able now to remain comfortably silent and attentive. Dear Noël he dearly loved to tell a story!. You are the very first person to hear this he began untruthfully; and the calm grey eyes of my friend Noël Anson merged into the luxurious stare with which the raconteur hypnotically fixes his prey all the world over. Even thus must the gentle Marlow have transfixed his hearers as he led them inexorably through the labyrinth of Lord Jim's career and through many another such intricacy of Conradian imagination.. It's old older than the stuff that hills and Armenians are made of he said. The ageless tale of the inevitable lady sitting alone in the inevitable box of the inevitable theatre to which our inevitable young man has gone to wile away a tiresome evening. History supplies the formula it is only the details for which I'm personally responsible.. There I sat one night years ago alone13 in a stall at the old Imperial; grimly smoking and watching the footlight favourites 'getting-off' with a stage-boxful of rowdy young men who hadn't the grace even to try to imitate the few gentlemen who might at one time have been good enough to know 'em—until on a moment my eyes circled round the upper boxes and fixed on a marvellous lady in white amazing and alone and unashamed....