The Square Emerald by Edgar Wallace — Read

GRETA GURDEN occupied an apartment on the first floor of a house in Portman Crescent. Hers was one of those artistic little flats that reflected every taste but her own. She slept in a red lacquer bed, ornamented by golden devils, a bargain acquired many years before in the Caledonian Market, and renovated by her own hands. Life is rather a tragedy for the lonely woman; there was a shadowy husband very much in the background, but he had either run away from her or was in a lunatic asylum or something equally unsatisfactory. She was one of the thousands who were endeavouring to keep a ten establishment on a seven and a half income. By profession she was a journalist; she edited a mildly scurrilous little paper called Mayfair Gossip, which enjoyed a very limited circulation, and in truth took up very little of her time. It was certainly not in the paper's interest that she fostered the delusion that her life was one of hectic gaiety. For she was to be seen occasionally at the most exclusive night clubs; more frequently at less exclusive establishments of the same order, her visitations being governed entirely by her wealth and the taste of her escort. And numerically she had many friends. Her expansiveness and lack of reticence, which had been tersely and uncharitably condensed into the vulgar word "gush, " however it might sicken the more sophisticated, was very pleasant to those who discovered from her for the first time how important or good--looking or well-- dressed they were, what taste, discrimination, or tact they displayed upon every conceivable occasion, and how anxiously or impatiently Greta was looking forward to their next meeting.

There were young men who took her out to dinner or to supper or to dances; and there were middle--aged men, fathers of families, whose hearts she fluttered with the promise of adventure never to be fulfilled, who escorted her to the less expensive places of popular amusement. There were, too, women who hovered everlastingly on that no--man's--land between Suburbia and Mayfair, who courted her society and influence, under the mistaken impression that she had the entree to the most select circles.