Every man who passed Lena on the street looked at her; some of them spoke to her; but she was possessed of a self-respect that kept her from responding to such overtures. She prided herself on her virtue. Certain it was that the admiration of the other sex never set her vibrating with delicate emotions, never increased by a single beat the pulses of her heart, except when it suggested some definite benefit to herself. With reason, Lena congratulated herself on her firm resistence to the many-formed temptations that come to beauty housed with poverty.
Now, as she looked in the milliner’s glass, she saw her own face, rose-like and delicate. She saw the great violet eyes, so innocent that they almost persuaded herself, as they did others, that some creature more celestial than ordinary humanity wondered from behind them at the world. She saw the fair soft curls that clung about her forehead, and the sight of these things gave a momentary peace to her soul. Then she surveyed the dingy felt hat that rested brutally on the silken wonder of her hair, and rebellion rose again.
“It’s a comfort that my collar fits so well,” she reassured herself. “After all, there is nothing more important than a collar. I don’t look in the least ‘common’.”
Among the hats stood a photograph of a popular actress, pert and pretty. The sight of it sent Lena’s thoughts afield into new wastes of bitterness.
The idea of the stage had once come to her like an inspiration. Nothing could be more easy and natural to her than to act; nothing more delectable than the tribute paid to the star. Money, flowing gowns, footlights, tumults of applause had seemed inevitable. Lena shivered now, with something else than cold inside her flimsy jacket, as she remembered the crumbling of her dream. She saw again the fat man with the sensual mouth who had given her a job; and felt again her tingling resentment when she found how small the part was, and how poorly paid. She remembered how she had held herself aloof from the other girls, who, like herself, had trivial parts, and how they had snubbed her in return; how even the little that she did was made ridiculous through the trick of a hook-nosed, gum-chewing rival, and how the first audience that she faced had tittered at her stumble. A wave of heat succeeded the shiver at this point in her remembrance. Then she recalled her impertinent answer to the vituperation of the manager, and how he had sworn at her for a damned minx, who thought herself a professional beauty.
“Vulgar! Vulgar! Vulgar!” she said to herself in impotent anger. She wished they could all know how she despised them. For she could act! She was still sure that she could play any part—except that of patient endurance. Yet, so far, hardship was all that life had offered her. A chance! That was it. So far, she had never had a ghost of a chance. Would fate—or luck—or Providence—or whatever it is that rules, never give her a turn of the wheel?
Next to the art of the milliner was displayed the art, less interesting to Lena, of the brush. Before the picture store a span of horses shook their jingling harness, and a brightly-buttoned coachman waited, with impassive face turned steadily to the front. There came from the doorway a girl who was lifted above the pharisaism of clothes into the purer ether. She was calm-eyed and well-poised, and Lena hated her for the rest of her life for her obliviousness of the sordid. Behind her walked a young man who now opened the carriage door and lingered a moment and laughed as he talked with the girl who had taken her seat. Lena involuntarily drew her feet closer beneath her skirts that no careless glance of that girl should fall upon their shabbiness. She looked at the man as she looked at the Russian sables. He was a type of that delectable world from which she was shut out.
“I should be ashamed to be silly about fellows, the way some girls are,” was her inward comment. “But I’d just like to have people see me with a thing like that dangling around me. And I shall, some time. I’m a whole heap prettier than she is.”
The carriage door shut abruptly. Lena’s too thin boots, out of plumb, suddenly slipped on a half-formed piece of ice. She made a desperate grab at the smooth surface of the window and then came ignominiously down—not wholly ignominiously, however, since her accident brought to her aid the man who was a type.
She didn’t have to stop to consider that the man would notice neither her hat nor her boots. She knew it instinctively and instantly. But the rose-petal face and the big eyes were overwhelmingly present to her consciousness. She saw them reflected in the look on his face as he bent over her.