Francesca
was one of those women towards whom Fate appears to have the best
intentions and never to carry them into practice. With the advantages put
at her disposal she might have been expected to command a more than
average share of feminine happiness. So many of the things that make for fretfulness,
disappointment and discouragement in a woman’s life were
removed from her path that she might well have been considered the fortunate
Miss Greech, or later, lucky Francesca Bassington. And she was not of the
perverse band of those who make a rock-garden of their
souls by dragging into them all the stoney griefs and unclaimed
troubles they can find lying around them. Francesca loved the smooth
ways and pleasant places of life; she liked not merely to look on the bright side of
things but to live there and stay there. And
the fact that things had, at one time and another, gone
badly with her and cheated her of some of her early
illusions made her cling the closer to such good fortune as remained
to her now that she seemed to have reached a calmer period of her
life. To undiscriminating friends she appeared in the
guise of a rather selfish woman, but it was merely the
selfishness of one who had seen the happy and unhappy sides
of life and wished to enjoy to the utmost what was left to her of the
former. The vicissitudes of fortune had not
soured her, but they had perhaps narrowed her in the
sense of making her concentrate much of her sympathies on things that immediately
pleased and amused her, or that recalled and perpetuated
the pleasing and successful incidents of other days.
And it was her drawing-room in particular that enshrined the memorials
or tokens of past and present happiness.
Paintings by F.C.B. Cadell (1883-1937).
Top: The Black Hat.
Bottom: Interior, The
Opera Hat.
Text: Saki, The
Unbearable Bassington, Ch. 1 (1912)
