I
Mrs. Bergmann was a widow. She was American by birth and marriage, and
English by education and habits. She was a fair, beautiful woman, with
large eyes and a white complexion. Her weak point was ambition, and
ambition with her took the form of luncheon-parties.
It was one summer afternoon that she was seized with the great idea of
her life. It consisted in giving a luncheon-party which should be more
original and amusing than any other which had ever been given in London.
The idea became a mania. It left her no peace. It possessed her like
venom or like madness. She could think of nothing else. She racked her
brains in imagining how it could be done. But the more she was harassed
by this aim the further off its realisation appeared to her to be. At
last it began to weigh upon her. She lost her spirits and her appetite;
her friends began to remark with anxiety on the change in her behaviour
and in her looks. She herself felt that the situation was intolerable,
and that success or suicide lay before her.
One evening towards the end of June, as she was sitting in her lovely
drawing-room in her house in Mayfair, in front of her tea-table,
on which the tea stood untasted, brooding over the question which
unceasingly tormented her, she cried out, half aloud:--
“I’d sell my soul to the devil if he would give me what I wish.”
At that moment the footman entered the room and said there was a
gentleman downstairs who wished to speak with her.
“What is his name?” asked Mrs. Bergmann.
The footman said he had not caught the gentleman’s name, and he handed
her a card on a tray.