Find the Woman

The Project Gutenberg eBook, Find the Woman, by Arthur Somers Roche, Illustrated by Dean Cornwell

Clancy Dean, the heroine of Find the Woman —from the painting by Dean Cornwell
Author of Uneasy Street, etc.
Copyright, 1921, by Cosmopolitan Book Corporation.—All rights reserved, including that of translation into foreign languages, including the Scandinavian
To ETHEL PETTIT ROCHE
Let Philip win his Clancy, As heroes always do; To each his own sweet fancy— My fancy is for you.

As the taxi stopped, Clancy leaned forward. Yes; she'd read the sign aright! It was Fifth Avenue that she saw before her.
Fifth Avenue! And she, Clancy Deane, of Zenith, Maine, was looking at it with her own eyes! Dreams did come true, after all. She, forty-eight hours ago a resident of a sleepy Maine town, was in the city whence came those gorgeous women who, in the summer-time, thrilled her as they disembarked from their yachts in Zenith Harbor, to stroll around the town, amusement in their eyes.
She looked to the left. A limousine, driven by a liveried chauffeur, beside whom sat another liveried man, was also stopped by the policeman in the center of the avenue. Furtively, Clancy eyed the slim matron who sat, leaning back, in the rear of the car. From the jaunty toque of blue cloth trimmed with gold, down the chinchilla-collared seal coat, past the edge of brown duveteen skirt to the short-vamped shoes that, although Clancy could not know it, had just come from Paris, the woman was everything that Clancy was not.
As the policeman blew a whistle and the taxi moved forward and turned up the avenue, Clancy sat more stiffly. Oh, well, give her six months— She knew well enough that her tailor-made was not the real thing. But it was the best that Bangor, nearest city to Zenith, could provide. And it would do. So would her hat that, by the presence of the woman in the limousine, was made to seem coarse, bucolic. Even her shoes, which she had been assured were the very latest thing, were, she suddenly knew, altogether too long and narrow. But it didn't matter. In her pocketbook she held the Open Sesame to New York.