Behind the Bronze Door by William Le Queux

Jessica Mervyn-Robertson was a remarkable woman. Tall, with a wonderful figure, she looked even taller than she actually was owing to her splendid bearing. Graceful in her every movement, wherever she went she focused attention. Her hair was of that peculiar shade of auburn blending into copper which seems, when the sun or the rays of artificial light strike it, to be shot with golden red. Her pale complexion contrasted oddly with the natural crimson of her lips, and when she looked at you there was an expression in her deep-set, almost green eyes which few men could resist. And yet perhaps what people noticed most about her was the curious intonation of her voice, a voice never forgotten by any man or woman who had once heard it. Had she been a singer she would have been a rich contralto.

She had appeared in London for the first time some years before this story opens, and within a few months had made hosts of friends. At that time she had a suite of apartments at Claridge's, where she entertained largely and on a lavish scale. Though nobody could say for certain whence she came, or from what source she derived her fortune, people of rank and others of social standing flocked to her receptions in their hundreds. She was said to have a husband, though no one had ever seen him, and nobody seemed in the least to care who or what he might be. People were satisfied to take so alluring a woman as they found her, and so popular had she become before the end of her first year in London, and so fashionable were her social functions, that not to know Jessica Mervyn-Robertson was to admit that you were _hors concours_.