There among the cushions of her chair she sprawled beneath the light of a shaded lamp on the further side, and in front of the leaping flames, a great, powerful, sinuous creature of sweeping curves, clad in a clinging brown dress, her head crowned with superb bronze hair, two warm arms bare to the elbow, at which the sleeve ended in coffee-coloured lace falling over the side of the chair, and her leopard eyes fixed on me.

About her still hung the echo of her last words spoken in deep tones whose register belongs less to human habitations than to the jungle.

And from her emanated like a captivating odour--but it was not an odour--a strange magnetic influence.
I have done my best to write her down in my mind a commonplace, vulgar, good-natured mountebank.

But I can do so no longer.
There is something deep down in the soul of Lola Brandt which sets her apart from the kindly race of womankind; whether it is the devil or a touch of pre-Adamite splendour or an ancestral catamount, I make no attempt to determine.

At any rate, she is too grand a creature to fritter her life away on a statistic-hunting and pheasant-shooting young Briton like Dale Kynnersley.