Her candour shocked almost as much as her egotism astounded him. She took for granted his desire to know all that could be told about her past, and talked of herself with unaffected enjoyment.

During their second meeting she informed him that her name was not Gloria at all, but Gladys Irene Mabel. Gladys Irene Mabel Wilcox - 'Well, what could you do with a name like that?' said she. 'When I went on the stage I changed it to Gloria. Gloria Wilcox went quite well, and I kept the Wilcox just to spite Dad because I knew he'd throw fits if they ever found out in Peterborough that he had a daughter in the chorus.'

Her father had been a solicitor's clerk in Peterborough, but Gladys Irene Mabel had found her style unsuited to cathedral cities. When just sixteen she was expelled from the High School for an outrageous flirtation with the grocer's assistant who played the part of 'Fairfax' in an amateur performance of The Teaman of the Guard. 'An awful little man he was really. Short legs, you know, and wore a bowler hat and said, "Pleased to meet you," though that wouldn't have troubled me then. For if he was common, so was I, thank heaven. There's some virtue in vulgarity that swings you over the hard places when you're young. He had a nice tenor voice, though, and I was crazy about the stage. I tried to make him run away with me to London, but he was much too pure. In fact, you know, my first attempt at seduction was a wash-out. He married an elementary school teacher and sings solos in the choir and has seven children. Oh well.'

But Gloria-Gladys, since she could not persuade the young man to accompany her to London, went there alone, and encountered such adventures in that city as are commonly supposed to occur to stage-struck girls of sixteen from the provinces. She found, to her dismay, that she was thought too tall for the chorus. She walked on in pantomime as one of Dick Whittington's young men friends in green tights and a leather jerkin, and she eventually crossed to America with a vaudeville producer in a capacity never clearly denned by contract. She sold cigarettes in the foyer of a New York hotel. She acted as hostess in a dance saloon. She displayed models as an outsize mannequin in a Chicago dress store, and in Rio de Janeiro she bore a child, which died, to an Italian real-estate agent whom she had met in Illinois. During the war she returned to Europe with an extremely respectable semi-amateur concert party under the auspices of the American Y.M.C.A.

The concert party went to Paris and there she met Gaston Calmier, a childless widower, no longer very young, the son of a Lyons silk merchant. He was a gentle, ineffective little man, but Gloria liked him, and when, in a panic of loneliness before he was finally called up to join his reserve regiment, he asked her to marry him, she accepted even before she knew that he had a small but pleasant fortune, carefully invested. 'A nice little man. He wouldn't have hurt a chicken. And he was killed six weeks after he'd reached the front. It was murder to send little creatures like him to fight. Well - life being what it is, perhaps it was better so. For him, and me.'

Basil, perforce, listened to this autobiography. While in Monte Carlo, he could not escape from Madame Calmier, and could not leave Monte Carlo while his sole means of livelihood lay there. But after three weeks of unsuccessful attempts at evasion, he suddenly succumbed to a sharp attack of gastric influenza.