Lord Arthur Savile’s Crime and Other Stories - Oscar Wilde (electronic book reader TXT) 📗
- Author: Oscar Wilde
Book online «Lord Arthur Savile’s Crime and Other Stories - Oscar Wilde (electronic book reader TXT) 📗». Author Oscar Wilde
“You went to the street, to the house in it?” I said.
“Yes,” he answered.
“One day I went to Cumnor Street. I could not help it; I was tortured with doubt. I knocked at the door, and a respectable-looking woman opened it to me. I asked her if she had any rooms to let. ‘Well, sir,’ she replied, ‘the drawing-rooms are supposed to be let; but I have not seen the lady for three months, and as rent is owing on them, you can have them.’—‘Is this the lady?’ I said, showing the photograph. ‘That’s her, sure enough,’ she exclaimed; ‘and when is she coming back, sir?’—‘The lady is dead,’ I replied. ‘Oh sir, I hope not!’ said the woman; ‘she was my best lodger. She paid me three guineas a week merely to sit in my drawing-rooms now and then.’ ‘She met someone here?’ I said; but the woman assured me that it was not so, that she always came alone, and saw no one. ‘What on earth did she do here?’ I cried. ‘She simply sat in the drawing-room, sir, reading books, and sometimes had tea,’ the woman answered. I did not know what to say, so I gave her a sovereign and went away. Now, what do you think it all meant? You don’t believe the woman was telling the truth?”
“I do.”
“Then why did Lady Alroy go there?”
“My dear Gerald,” I answered, “Lady Alroy was simply a woman with a mania for mystery. She took these rooms for the pleasure of going there with her veil down, and imagining she was a heroine. She had a passion for secrecy, but she herself was merely a Sphinx without a secret.”
“Do you really think so?”
“I am sure of it,” I replied.
He took out the morocco case, opened it, and looked at the photograph. “I wonder?” he said at last.
The Model Millionaire A Note of AdmirationUnless one is wealthy there is no use in being a charming fellow. Romance is the privilege of the rich, not the profession of the unemployed. The poor should be practical and prosaic. It is better to have a permanent income than to be fascinating. These are the great truths of modern life which Hughie Erskine never realised. Poor Hughie! Intellectually, we must admit, he was not of much importance. He never said a brilliant or even an ill-natured thing in his life. But then he was wonderfully good-looking, with his crisp brown hair, his clear-cut profile, and his grey eyes. He was as popular with men as he was with women and he had every accomplishment except that of making money. His father had bequeathed him his cavalry sword and a History of the Peninsular War in fifteen volumes. Hughie hung the first over his looking-glass, put the second on a shelf between Ruff’s Guide and Bailey’s Magazine, and lived on two hundred a year that an old aunt allowed him. He had tried everything. He had gone on the Stock Exchange for six months; but what was a butterfly to do among bulls and bears? He had been a tea-merchant for a little longer, but had soon tired of pekoe and souchong. Then he had tried selling dry sherry. That did not answer; the sherry was a little too dry. Ultimately he became nothing, a delightful, ineffectual young man with a perfect profile and no profession.
To make matters worse, he was in love. The girl he loved was Laura
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