



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,