Her Faithful Knight — page 51: what you’re looking at

Machine-transcribed from the original scan — historical spelling and the odd misread are preserved.

A Story of London. 47 remember that there was another woman living but my- self, yet all the women in the company liked and ad- mired him, while the men detested him. ‘They used to call him Cupid, which made me very angry, though I hardly knew why. He had great blue eyes, with curled- up dark lashes, beautiful features, a black mustache, and short, curly black hair. His figure was tall and graceful, and he moved and dressed so well that he made the other men look clumsy. “Of course, all the company began to chatter when Mr. Trevelyan and I were constantly together. Sergius told me not to mind; he said their coarse minds could not understand a friendship of souls such as ours, and I agreed with him. Long before he ever told me he loved me, he would sit by my side reading aloud to me, in a beautiful voice which thrilled with feeling passages from Tennyson and Mrs. Browning, and Matthew Arnold and Shelley. He considered Robert Browning coarse, and Swinburne animal, he said. I never met any man who seemed to have such tender, delicate susceptibilities. “One of the married women had to leave to go home to nurse her child, and in her place a girl was engaged who speedily gave the whole company something to talk about. She was very pretty, I suppose; at least, all the men thought her so, and she flirted with them all under the eyes of their wives, and laughed at them, and used bad language when she got excited. But she used to have champagne in the dressing-room and offer it to the others, and all the women, although they pretended to be shocked, liked her very much better than they did me. “Miss Montgomery, for that is what she called her- self, fell in love, or pretended to fall in love, with Mr. Trevelyan. He did not seem to take any notice of her, but I got dreadfully unhappy and jealous, so jealous and Eomicbdoo KS