England -- Social life and customs -- 20th century -- Fiction; Mate selection -- Fiction; Young women -- Fiction
It is possible that Penelope never enjoyed herself so much as she did at
this period. She was so busy that she had no time to worry; her team
took all her time. She was young, she was beautiful, she was adored,
she was popular, she was even notorious. A dozen reporters dogged her
footsteps, and when they lost her they followed her lovers. They
haunted her door-step armed with kodaks; they invented paragraphs; they
hunted her men and her maids. They made love to the girls, and seduced
the men into neighbouring bars. One newspaper man, who belonged to the
_Mayfair Daily_, got into her establishment as a footman, and was
discovered by the butler drawing Penelope at dinner when he should have
been drawing corks. A search in his clothes revealed some pencils and a
note-book and another book of drawings. They were of such a character
that the reporter was put outside into the street. The butler could
have forgiven the sketch of his mistress: there was one of himself that
no man could forgive.
The great desire of all these men was to spot the winner. Penelope’s
maid, Harriet Weekes, who was more or less engaged to Timothy Bunting,
the groom (a sad _mésalliance_, by the way), found it impossible to go
out without being accosted respectfully by a new admirer, who tried to
lead the conversation around to her mistress.
"If you please, my lady, another of them spoke to me to-day. I hope, my
lady, you don’t think it my fault," said Weekes.
"What do they say?" asked Penelope, curiously. She took great interest
in the manners and customs of other classes, perhaps with a view of
altering them when she got time.
Public-domain text, read in full here on John Shaqi.
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