A Little Girl in Old San Francisco

by Amanda M. Douglas

Agnes Westbury watched her stepdaughter closely when the two young men were gone. She did not droop. She was happy and serene, compliant with whatever was proposed. She made some visits to the hospital with Miss Doncaster; that was safe enough. Charity had not come to be a fad then, though there were many earnest workers.

Mr. Westbury and Lord Wrexford took a run over to Paris. After that he was a frequent visitor. Mrs. Westbury had a curious charm for him. She was so intelligent that he sometimes forgot it was like talking to a man.

"You American women know about your husband's business and never seem to think it a bore," he said one evening. "Ours do take an interest in politics when their husbands are up. And you have the art of making attractive homes. Now, the average person would have a certain stiffness about this place——" The belongings were of the regulation sort, and individual taste was hardly comprehended.

She had added some easy chairs, an odd and pretty table, with a series of shelves to hold books of engravings, and portraits of celebrated authors and artists, several fine vases disposed around, and these articles announced with an air "we belong to the present mistress," the furniture belongs to the house.

"I like to take some comfort and not be continually fretted with surroundings. As we are living in furnished houses mostly, I can't suit myself. I don't pretend to. I just have a little and dream of what will be when we are permanently settled."

"I wonder if that will be here—in London?" tentatively.

"I think I shall not go back to America, 'the States,' as you call it," smiling a little. "I shall have Laverne to keep me company if Mr. Westbury has to take a business journey. I confess to a fondness for the older civilization. Our land is still in an undeniably crude state. But so were you a few centuries back."

This woman had a curious charm in her frankness, that was never rude even in its most truthful moments. There was something about her that he could not define, and that kept him studying and full of interest, watching the next turn. If it was art, it was the most judiciously managed. If it was due to temperament, then, indeed, she had a many-sided nature. She kept young, but it was not the shy simplicity of her daughter, she seemed to have a wide range of knowledge, but she was not pedantic, not obtrusive. There were dainty concessions that flattered a man, little embellishments that seemed an understanding of a man's mood, too delicate for him to pick to pieces, if he could. Then there was a mysterious charm about her attire, a French adaptiveness of style, of something made different from most women, with a touch of color, a bow or a flower. She was a pleasant study.

Now and then she delicately drew Laverne into the talk. She asked her to bring over the portfolio of Albert Dürer's engravings they had bought only a few days before, and draw up the small buhl stand. Then they discussed them and Holland; she had been reading up a volume of travels that very morning, and was as fresh as if she had just come from there. Laverne was appealed to for this or that. She was not kept in the background, but she seemed always flying there with adorable shyness.

Afterward in his own room, smoking his pipe, he thought the matter over, as he often did. He had been rescued from an esclandre, his father had been buried as became one of the old line of Wrexfords. He could go back to the Grange with a certain prestige. He might be asked to stand for Chediston. There would be no more straits and pinches of poverty, and he had suffered a good many during the last three years. All this smooth sailing was conditioned on his marrying Laverne Westbury. She was a nice enough young girl, but he had had a surfeit of young girls. It would be hard to bridge over the seventeen years between them, very hard for her.