Ella Hepworth Dixon

The Story of a Modern Woman

1894. Merlin Press, 1990.

So she walked to the Regent's Park, and there, in the trim flower-garden, where the avenue of chestnuts was making long shadows on the neatly-swept paths, Mary sat down and waited. It was high midsummer now; there was a velvety smoothness on the trim lawns, the green light filtered through a canopy of broad chestnut leaves, and the beds were odorous with heliotrope, purple with pansies, and aglow with geraniums

Mary is meeting her lover in an hour's time; meanwhile she studies the other visitors to the park. 'There was a young woman with restless eyes and a hard mouth, keeping a rendezvous with a lover who had not yet appeared; a nurse or two with a swarm of children from the surrounding Georgian terraces, racing and squealing and looking like white rabbits with their pink noses and creamy boots.' She feels drawn towards the young woman and 'would like to have gone up and said something kind. "If that tawdry-looking girl could write down her story," thought Mary, as she passed her, "we should have another masterpiece! It is because they suffer so that women have written supremely good fiction"'.

Visiting Whitechapel Hospital some time later Mary recognizes the girl, now close to death after trying to drown herself in the canal. The doctor too recognizes her, and the girl recognizes him - the lover she had been waiting for in the park, who had abandoned her when she had started to suspect his real intentions.