The following was created by cobbling together passages from The Lion and the Lamb by E. Phillips Oppenheim.

The girl swung herself around on the couch, threw a smoked out cigarette to the hearth, pressed back her hair and sat up.

David passed her a box, and she lit one with a little murmur of satisfaction.

"The last thing I remember that night was you in your blue pajamas."

David, surprisingly overpowered by the thought of Belle with her amazing personality, her perfume, her flamboyant charms, at close quarters was suddenly terrified.

"I am here to destroy you after a fashion of my own."

"Aren’t you getting a little creepy?" he ventured.

"The whole thing is absurd," she drawled. "Life itself seems absurd since I was pitched into the middle of these ridiculous people.

She looked across at him, an anxious light in her eyes, but a defiant smile curving her lips.

"You still seem restless, David. Doesn’t my visit please you? Your room is so hot. Do you mind if I throw open my furs?"

"Of course not," he assented. "Let me help you."

She loosened the fastenings. A breath of that curious perfume stole up to him and again he felt that faint shiver which he had previously resented. She smiled – the fine sensuous lips of a Venus, slowly parting, as she bent over one refractory clasp.

"Now I am more comfortable," she confided, one hand resting upon his shoulder. "Do you want me to tell you – everything?"

She stood there, her hands at her sides, her furs thrown back, her scarlet frock a line of flame in the room, looking across at him.

"I am coming to you," she said. "It is for you to say the rest."

"Why?" he asked quickly.

She looked at him and smiled – a smile of reminiscence. Then she knocked the ash from her cigarette.

"Ah, well," she murmured. "There might be many reasons."

I hate that overwhelming perfume she uses, he thought, and I hate that covert insolence all the time underlying her manner. She is in her wrong place over here. She should be a sultana in some Eastern country. The most fascinating thing in life is still the flashing of lurid colours on to the grim canvas of the sullen night, the hysteria of passion, men grabbing for one another’s throats, the stab of pain, the whistling bullet.