A STUDY IN SHADOWS By William J. Locke London: John Lane MCMVIII CHAPTER I.--THE LONE WOMEN. |Felicia Graves was puzzled. The six weeks she had spent at the Pension Boccard had confused many of her conceptions and brought things before her judgment for which her standards were inadequate. Not that a girl who had passed the few years of her young womanhood in the bubbling life of a garrison town could be as unsophisticated as village innocence in the play; but her fresh, virginal experience had been limited to what was seemly, orthodox, and comfortable. She was shrewd enough in the appreciation of superficial vanities, rightly esteeming their value as permanent elements; but the baser follies of human nature had not been reached by her young eyes. Her whole philosophy of life had been bound up in well-ordered family systems, in which the men were honest and well-bred, and the women either comfortable matrons or fresh-minded, companionable girls like herself. She knew vaguely that sorrows and bitterness and broken lives existed in the world, but hitherto she had never reckoned upon coming into contact with them. They all lay in the dim sphere where crime and immorality held sway, whose internal upheavals affected her as little as dynastic commotions in China. The lives and habits and opinions therefore of the six lonely women who, with one old gentleman, formed her sole daily companions in the Pension Boccard, were a subject of much puzzled and half-frightened speculation on the part of the young English girl.