It was extremely early the next morning that I presented myself at Vinnie Brunelle's apartment-hotel. I had not only slept badly; I had also dreamed of myself as a flagellant monk sent across scorching sands to beg a barbaric and green-eyed Thais to desist from tapping telegraph-wires leading into the camp of Alexander the Great.
The absurdity of that opianic nightmare seemed to project itself into my actual movements of the morning. The exacting white light of day withered the last tendril of romance from my quixotic crusade. It was only by assuring myself, not so much that I was espousing the cause of the fallen, but that I was about to meet a type of woman quite new to my experience, that I was able to face Miss Brunelle's unbetrayingly sober door.
This door was duly answered by a maid, by a surprisingly decorous maid in white cap and apron. I was conscious of her veiled yet inquisitorial eye resting on my abashed person for the smallest fraction of a second. I almost suspected that in that eye might be detected a trace of something strangely like contempt. But, a little to my astonishment, I was admitted quite without question.
"Miss Brunelle is just back from her morning ride in the park," this maid explained.
I entered what was plainly a dining-room, a small but well-lighted chamber. Striped awnings still kept the tempered autumn sun from the opened windows, where a double row of scarlet geranium-tops stood nodding in the breeze. At one end of the table in the center of the room sat a woman, eating her breakfast.
She was younger looking, much younger looking, than I had thought she would be. Had she not sat there already inundated by the corroding acids of an earlier prejudice, I would even have admitted that she was an extremely beautiful woman.
She was in a rose-colored dressing-gown which showed a satin-like smoothness of skin at the throat and arms. Her eyes, I could see, were something between a hazel and a green, set wide apart under a Pallas Athena brow, that might have been called serene, but for some spirit of rebellion vaguely refracted from the lower part of the face. The vividness of her color, which even the flaming sweep of her gown could not altogether discount, made me think of material buoyancies, of living flesh and blood and a body freshly bathed.
Her gaze was direct, disconcertingly direct. It even made me question whether or not she was reading my thought as I noted that her hands were large and white, that her mouth, for all its brooding discontent, was not without humor, and, strangely enough, that her fingers, ears, and throat were without a touch of that jewelry which I had thought peculiar to her kind.
That she possessed some vague yet menacing gift of intimacy I could only too plainly feel, not so much from the undisturbed ease of her pose and the negligently open throat and arms as from the direct gaze of those searching and limpid eyes, which proclaimed that few of the poppied illusions of life could flower in their neighborhood. This discomforting sense of mental clarity, in fact, forced me into the consciousness not so much of being in the presence of a soft and luxurious body as of standing face to face with a spirit that in its incongruous way was as austere as it was alert.
"You wish to see me?" she said, over her coffee-cup. My second glance showed me that she was eating a breakfast of iced grape-fruit and chops and scrambled eggs and buttered toast.