In the bright street light he looked up, studying her face. He had never really observed it before. Before he had watched it for a sign of life that was only the antithesis of death, but now he found himself regarding it from another viewpoint. Her slender, pretty face was wholly in keeping with her humor, her honesty, her instinctive good manners. If she were a factory worker, hard toil had not in the least coarsened or hardened her. Her skin had a healthy freshness, pink like the marvelous pink of certain spring wild flowers, and she had delicate girlish features that wholly suited his appraising eye.
She was one of those girls who have worlds of hair to spend lavishly in setting off piquant faces. It must have been dark brown; at least it looked so in the street light. Below was a clear, girlish brow, with never a line except the friendly ones of companionship and humor. Her eyes seemed to be deeply blue, good-natured, childishly happy, amazingly clear and luminous, a perfect index to her mood. Now they were smiling, partly with delight in the ride and in the luxury of the car, partly from the sheer joy of the adventure. Ned rather wished that the light was better. He’d like to have given them further study.
She had a pretty nose, and full, almost sensuous lips that curled easily and softly as she smiled. Then there was a delectable glimpse of the little hollow of a slender throat, at the collar of her dress.
Ned found himself staring, and he didn’t know just why. He was no stranger to women’s beauty; some degree of it was the rule rather than the exception in the circle in which he moved; but some way this before him now was beauty of a different kind. It was warm, and it went down inside of him and touched some particular mood and fancy that had never manifested itself before. He had seen such beauty, now and again, in children—young girls with the freshness of a spring flower, just emerging into the bloom of first womanhood, and not yet old enough for him to meet in a social way—but it had never occurred to him that it could linger past the “flapper” age. This girl in his car was in her early twenties—over, rather than under—of medium height, with the slender strength of an expert swimmer, yet her beauty was that of a child.
He couldn’t tell, at first, in just what her beauty lay. Other girls had fresh skins, bright eyes, smiling lips and masses of dark, lustrous hair,—and some of them even had the simplicity of good manners. Ned had a quick, sure mind, and for a moment he mused over his wheel as he tried to puzzle it out.
In all probability it lay in the soft, girlish lines about her lips and eyes. Curiously there was not the slightest hardness about them. Some way, this girl had missed a certain hardening process that most of his own girl friends had undergone; the life of the twentieth century, in a city of more than three hundred thousand, had left her unscathed. There were only tenderness and girlish sweetness in the lines, not sophistication, not self-love, not recklessness or selfishness that he had some way come to expect.
But soon after this Ned Cornet caught himself with a whispered oath. He was positively maudlin! The excitement, the near approach to tragedy, the influence of the liquor manifesting itself once more in his veins were making him stare and think like a silly fool. The girl was a particularly attractive shopgirl or factory worker, strong and athletic for all her appealing slenderness, doubtless pretty enough to waken considerable interest in certain of his friends who went in for that sort of thing, but he, Ned Cornet, had other interests. The gaze he bent upon her was suddenly indifferent.
They were almost at their destination now, and he did not see the sudden decline of her mood in response to his dying interest. Sensitive as a flower to sunlight, she realized in a moment that a barrier of caste had dropped down between them. She was silent the rest of the way.
“Would you mind telling me what you do—in the way of work, I mean?” he asked her, at her door. “My father has a business that employs many girls. There might be a chance——”
“I can do almost anything with a needle, thank you,” she told him with perfect frankness. “Fitting, hemstitching, embroidery—I could name a dozen other things.”