Yet such is the marvel of our lives that fate takes pleasure in contradicting our most cherished beliefs. For, as you shall see, dear reader, Miss Molly’s visit was occasioned by the most astonishing motive!
Chapter 3
For the nonce I must have appeared to both these young ladies as a gaping idiot, for when I beheld Miss Molly Bashe standing before me, my jaw dropped and I stared at her uncomprehendingly, as I could not for the life of me understand why this damsel whom I had served so cruelly would ever dare show herself within a hundred yards of me again.
“I do hope, Mr. Jack,” Molly Bashe declared in her rather high-pitched, affectatious voice, “that Julia and I have not disturbed you this afternoon.”
I eyed the delectable brown-haired minx who stood beside her and who stared at me with rather bold dark brown eyes, her small but very ripe mouth curled in a kind of tolerant sneer. I began to believe that here was a veritable counterpart of Molly, remembering how insolent and self-centered that young lady had been until the famous afternoon in the Snuggery with her mother. But for the life of me I could not fathom Molly’s motive for visiting me again, for she could only remember me as the perpetrator of her shame and that of her mother’s as well. I had taken her virginal hymen, made her girl-love her own portly, mature mother, and then subjected the pair of them to the depredations of Connie, Fanny and my own beloved Alice.