“Oh, I am quite ready to wait on you,” said Eva smiling.
Mrs. Carter smiled also, for her genial nature was always ready to meet cordiality half way, and she said blandly.
“Would you mind just stepping over among the lace shawls, they tell me you’re hired to show such things off, and I might take one, if they’ve got something a little superber than the shawl Mrs. Lambert just brought home from Europe. She sits right before me in church, you know, and wears it in the most aggravating way. Every time I kneel down, that eternal pattern of morning-glory vines, creeping over her shoulder, is before my eyes, daring me to get anything like it, if I can, for love or money. I’m expected to feel meek and humble all the same. It isn’t in human nature. That woman and I can’t be members of the same church if she keeps this thing up. One’s moral character won’t stand such strains; kneeling at the same altar with a woman who wears a fifteen hundred dollar lace shawl, and mine only a thousand, and Carter fairly wallowing in greenbacks, is more than I can stand.”
Eva listened till her amused smile deepened into a laugh, which the man heard with a thrill of pain that ran through him like an arrow. Tilled with recollections that made his blood stir like old wine in his heart, he drew back and watched the girl narrowly, as she conversed with his sister.
“Oh! if you want a fifteen hundred dollar shawl, it is an easy thing to get. Shall I go with you to the lace counter?” said Eva, quite unconscious of the stranger’s regard.
“But it must have a morning-glory vine running through it, leaves and bells like hers, only more of ’em. I’m resolved that our church shall see no costlier shawl than Richard Carter’s lady wears, while it sends up a steeple. Now just tell that young man to show us the very best he’s got. Nothing less than fifteen hundred, understand.”
The light-haired clerk heard all this conversation, and followed the party up to the lace counter, where he became very officious in exhibiting shawls, to which he affixed enormous prices with a solemn gravity of countenance that impressed Mrs. Richard Carter greatly. This helped her to fix upon a beautiful fabric, certainly, but one she would not have deigned to purchase at its real value, which was just five hundred dollars less than the depletion of that huge roll of greenbacks with which the good lady went armed on her shopping excursions.
“There,” she said, crushing the money she had left into her reticule-purse, and winding the chain about her wrist and little finger, on which she wore a great diamond ring outside the glove, “I begin to feel like myself again. You are sure that a higher-priced shawl than that isn’t to be found in New York, young man?”
“Positive of it, madam: for I don’t believe there is another salesman in New York that would have the courage to set that figure,” he muttered, after the first brief reply. “Not another imported. Rest content that you have the shawl of the season, madam. Shall I send it to your carriage?”
“Yes, give it to my footman, a tall fellow in maroon livery, with a gold band. You’ll see Carter’s and my monogram on the carriage-door.”