



Produced by Charles Franks and the Online Distributed Proofreading Team









The Author's Press Series of the Works of Elinor Glyn


THE POINT OF VIEW


ELINOR GLYN




CHAPTER I


The restaurant of the Grand Hotel in Rome was filling up. People were
dining rather late--it was the end of May and the entertainments were
lessening, so they could dawdle over their repasts and smoke their
cigarettes in peace.

Stella Rawson came in with her uncle and aunt, Canon and the Honorable
Mrs. Ebley, and they took their seats in a secluded corner. They looked
a little out of place--and felt it--amid this more or less gay company.
But the drains of the Grand Hotel were known to be beyond question,
and, coming to Rome so late in the season, the Reverend Canon Ebley
felt it was wiser to risk the contamination of the over-worldly-minded
than a possible attack of typhoid fever. The belief in a divine
protection did not give him or his lady wife that serenity it might
have done, and they traveled fearfully, taking with them their own
jaeger sheets among other precautions.

They realized they must put up with the restaurant for meals, but at
least the women folk should not pander to the customs of the place and
wear evening dress. Their subdued black gowns were fastened to the
throat. Stella Rawson felt absolutely excited--she was twenty-one years
old, but this was the first time she had ever dined in a fashionable
restaurant, and it almost seemed like something deliciously wrong.

Life in the Cathedral Close where they lived in England was not highly
exhilarating, and when its duties were over it contained only mild
gossip and endless tea-parties and garden-parties by way of recreation.

Canon and the Honorable Mrs. Ebley were fairly rich people. The Uncle
Erasmus' call to the church had been answered from inclination--not
necessity. His heart was in his work. He was a good man and did his
duty according to the width of the lights in which he had been brought
up.

Mrs. Ebley did more than her duty--and had often too much momentum,
which now and then upset other people's apple carts.

She had, in fact, been the moving spirit in the bringing about of her
niece Stella's engagement to the Bishop's junior chaplain, a young
gentleman of aesthetic aspirations and eight hundred a year of his own.

Stella herself had never been enthusiastic about the affair. As a man,
Eustace Medlicott said absolutely nothing at all to her--though to be
sure she was quite unaware that he was inadequate in this respect. No
man had meant anything different up to this period of her life. She had
seen so few of them she was no judge.

Eustace Medlicott had higher collars than the other curates, and
intoned in a wonderfully melodious voice in the cathedral. And quite a
number of the young ladies of Exminster, including the Bishop's second
daughter, had been setting their caps at him from the moment of his
arrival, so that when, by the maneuvers of Aunt Caroline Ebley, Stella
found him proposing to her, she somehow allowed herself to murmur some
sort of consent.

Then it seemed quite stimulating to have a ring and to be congratulated
upon being engaged. And the few weeks that followed while the thing was
fresh and new had passed quite pleasantly. It was only when about a
month had gone by that a gradual and growing weariness seemed to be
falling upon her.

To be the wife of an aesthetic high church curate, who fasted severely
during Lent and had rigid views upon most subjects, began to grow into
a picture which held out less and less charm for her.

But Aunt Caroline was firm--and the habit of twenty-one years of
obedience held.

Perhaps Fate was looking on in sympathy with her unrest. In any case,
it appeared like the jade's hand and not chance which made Uncle
Erasmus decide to take his holiday early in the year and to decide to
spend it abroad--not in Scotland or Wales as was his custom.

Stella, he said, should see the eternal city and Florence before
settling down in the autumn to her new existence.

Miss Rawson actually jumped with joy--and the knowledge that Eustace
Medlicott would be unable to accompany them, but might join them later
on, did not damp her enthusiasm.

Every bit of the journey was a pleasure, from the moment they landed on
French soil. They had come straight through to Rome from Paris, where
they had spent a week at a small hotel; because of the lateness of the
year they must get to their southern point first of all and return
northward in a more leisurely manner.

And now anyone who is reading this story can picture this respectable
English family and understand their status and antecedents, so we can
very well get back to them seated in the agreeable restaurant of the
Grand Hotel at Rome--beginning to partake of a modest dinner.

Mrs. Ebley (I had almost written the Reverend Mrs. Ebley!) was secretly
enjoying herself--she had that feeling that she was in a place where
she ought not to be--through no fault of her own--and so was free to
make the most of it, and certainly these well-dressed