My Secret Life

She was a well-arsed, well-made, plump girl about twenty-one years old, and had a wonderfully white skin. She had been fucked before, but I believed from all I learnt from her, Laura and Fred, that for two years a prick had not entered her. A man who had paid his addresses to her had deceived her, then cleared off, I expect after tailing her.

I did not profess to keep Mabel after this, but paid for the second-floor rooms (Fred had taken the upper part of the house, three bed- and one sitting room), and my share of the living, and slept with her almost regularly for a short time, gave her money, dressed her, and did all a man does who keeps a woman; but I never cared much about her, and was not constant. She like Laura was fairly educated. A few months afterwards she went back to her native town, and al-though she wrote to me, I never saw her again, and had some idea that Lord A.... kept her, why I shall tell further on. One reason of my being indifferent to her was that she never properly washed herself. Her beautiful white flesh never seemed to need it, but I did not like a woman who just smeared her face and neck, and never below. I told her of it, and she was offended.

About three weeks after I first had Mabel, Fred and I went to shoot with some friends at ***shire; it was towards the end of November, all the leaves were well off the trees.

As said I had female cousins by several aunts, two of them about seventeen or eighteen years of age were at a finishing-school for young ladies. It was a large old-fashioned house kept by three ladies of whom one had been married a year, although then forty years old, to a curate about sixty-five years old. The sisters unmarried were between fifty and sixty years old, stern and stiff-rumped. Maris the married one, fat and forty, with jet-black hair and merry hazel eyes, had been disappointed in her youth, and when this clergyman, whom she had known all her life, proposed, she accepted I suppose for companionship, and because it gave her consideration in the neighbourhood.

The house was originally a very big old mansion, large enough for two schools, and had been roughly divided by walls and partitions into two houses. The smaller was inhabited by Maria and her husband, and the kitchen-garden was attached to it. All access to the pleasure-grounds of the other, or school-part of the house, was bricked up. In an establishment for young ladies, all of a fuckable age, and none without hair on their cunts, it would never have done to leave male access, not even to a curate sixty-five years old. The gardeners were elderly men, they came round by the house to go to the kitchen-garden, which supplied both houses. Mrs. Maria used to go round to the school daily.

The air of the neighbourhood was fine, and although not professing to lodge people, if any of the female relatives of the young ladies at the school desired it, they could go and stop for a week or two at the curate's, of course paying for so doing.

Fred and I had invitations to shooting not far off, just as my aunt went to stay a week at Mrs. Maria's and to see her girl. Our friends could accommodate Fred only, and sooner than be separated, and for other reasons, we wrote to the old curate to know if he could receive us two men, — and my aunt as well, —which he did. We took up our quarters there. I had unpacked, and went into Fred's room. “Here is a jolly cupboard”, said he opening the door of one big enough for four people to stand in. “If a woman were sleeping here, she would always be thinking some one was hidden in it; it's a jolly place for boxes and clothes.” He was hanging up something, when he stopped and listened. “Damned if there are not women laughing”, said he, “hish !” But he heard nothing more.

Two or three minutes afterwards he said, “Here Walter”, and both listening heard the voices of women, but very indistinctly. Fred lighted a candle. Said he, “Here is an old door screwed up, it leads into a room. What a lark to get it open, or a hole through it; nothing I so like as to hear what women say, when they think no one hears them.”