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THREE WEEKS

BY
ELINOR GLYN

1907



INTRODUCTION TO
MY AMERICAN READERS

I feel now, when my "Three Weeks" is to be launched in a new land,
where I have many sympathetic friends, that, owing to the
misunderstanding and misrepresentation it received from nearly the
entire press and a section of the public in England, I would like to
state my view of its meaning. (As I wrote it, I suppose it could be
believed I know something about that!) For me "the Lady" was a deep
study, the analysis of a strange Slav nature, who, from circumstances
and education and her general view of life, was beyond the ordinary
laws of morality. If I were making the study of a Tiger, I would not
give it the attributes of a spaniel, because the public, and I myself,
might prefer a spaniel! I would still seek to portray accurately
every minute instinct of that Tiger, to make a living picture. Thus,
as you read, I want you to think of her as such a study. A great
splendid nature, full of the passionate realisation of primitive
instincts, immensely cultivated, polished, blase. You must see her at
Lucerne, obsessed with the knowledge of her horrible life with her
brutal, vicious husband, to whom she had been sacrificed for political
reasons when almost a child. She suddenly sees this young Englishman,
who comes as an echo of something straight and true in manhood which,
in outward appearance at all events, she has met in her youth in the
person of his Uncle Hubert. She perceives in him at once the Soul
sleeping there; and it produces in her a strong emotion. Then I want
you to understand the effect of Love on them both. In her it rose from
caprice to intense devotion, until the day at the Farm when it reached
the highest point--a desire to reproduce his likeness. How, with the
most passionate physical emotion, her mental influence upon Paul was
ever to raise him to vast aims and noble desires for future
greatness. In him love opened the windows of his Soul, so that he saw
the fine in everything.

The immense rush of passion in Venice came from her knowledge that
they soon must part. Notice the effect of the two griefs on Paul. The
first, with its undefined hope, making him do well in all things--even
his prowess as a hunter--to raise himself to be more worthy in her
eyes; the second and paralysing one of death, turning him into adamant
until his soul awakens again with the returning spring of her spirit
in his heart, and the consolation of the living essence of their love
in the child.

The minds of some human beings are as moles, grubbing in the earth for
worms. They have no eyes to see God's sky with the stars in it. To
such "Three Weeks" will be but a sensual record of passion. But those
who do look up beyond the material will understand the deep pure love,
and the Soul in it all, and they will realise that to such a nature as
"the Lady's," passion would never have run riot until it was
sated--she would have daily grown nobler in her desire to make her
Loved One's son a splendid man.

And to all who read, I say--at least be just! and do not skip. No line
is written without its having a bearing upon the next, and in its
small scope helping to make the presentment of these two human beings
vivid and clear.

The verdict I must leave to the Public, but now, at all events, you
know, kind Reader, that _to me_, the "Imperatorskoye" appears a
noble woman, because she was absolutely faithful to the man she had
selected as her mate, through the one motive which makes a union moral
in ethics--Love.--ELINOR GLYN.




THREE WEEKS


CHAPTER I


Now this is an episode in a young man's life, and has no real
beginning or ending. And you who are old and have forgotten the
passions of youth may condemn it. But there are others who are
neither old nor young who, perhaps, will understand and find some
interest in the study of a strange woman who made the illumination of
a brief space.

Paul Verdayne was young and fresh and foolish when his episode
began. He believed in himself--he believed in his mother, and in a
number of other worthy things. Life was full of certainties for
him. He was certain he liked hunting better than anything else in the
world--for instance. He was certain he knew his own mind, and
therefore perfectly certain his passion for Isabella Waring would last
for ever! Ready to swear eternal devotion with that delightful
inconsequence of youth in its unreason, thinking to control an emotion
as Canute's flatterers would have had him do the waves.

And the Creator of waves--and emotions--no doubt smiled to Himself--if
He is not tired by now of smiling at the follies of the moles called
human beings, who for the most part inhabit His earth!

Paul was young, as I said, and fair and strong. He had been in the
eleven at Eton and left Oxford with a record for all that should turn
a beautiful Englishman into a perfect athlete. Books had not worried
him much! The fit of a hunting-coat, the pace of a horse, were things
of more importance, but he scraped through his "Smalls" and his
"Mods," and was considered by his friends to be anything but a
fool. As for his mother--the Lady Henrietta Verdayne--she thought him
a god among men!

Paul went to London like others of his time, and attended the
theatres, where perfectly virtuous young ladies display nightly their
innocent charms in hilarious choruses, arrayed in the latest
_modes_. He supped, too, with these houris--