I was nineteen years old, and a stranger in the great strange world of America, and grievously tormented by grim realities. As I did not know how to face those realities, I tried to forget them as much as possible; and romantic dreams, daily nourished at a public library, helped me to forget. Next to this unpaid luxury of reading, my chief pleasure was to wander about the streets of the town, trying to find in passing faces—faces of girls—some realization of certain ideals. And I found an almost equal pleasure in looking at the photographs placed on display at the doors of photographers’ shops,—called, in that place and time, “galleries.” Picture-galleries they were indeed for me, during many, many penniless months.
One day, in a by-street, I discovered a new photographer’s shop; and in a glass case, at the entrance, I beheld a face the first sight of which left me breathless with wonder and delight,—a face incomparably surpassing all my dreams. It was the face of a young woman wearing, for head-dress, something that looked like an embroidered scarf; and this extraordinary head-dress might have been devised for the purpose of displaying, to artistic advantage, the singular beauty of the features. The gaze of the large dark eyes was piercing and calm; the aquiline curve of the nose was clear as the curve of a sword; the mouth was fine, but firm;—and, in spite of the sensitive delicacy of this face, there was a something accipitrine about it,—something sinister and superb, that made me think of a falcon.... For a long, long time I stood looking at it, and the more I looked, the more the splendid wonder of it seemed to grow—like a fascination. I thought that I would suffer much—ever so much!—for the privilege of worshipping the real woman. But who was she? I dared not ask the owner of the “gallery;” and I could not think of any other means of finding out.
I had one friend in those days,—the only fellow countryman whom I knew in that American town,—a man who had preceded me into exile by nearly forty years,—and to him I went. With all of my boyish enthusiasms he used to feel an amused sympathy; and when I told him about my discovery, he at once proposed to go with me to the photograph-shop.
For several moments he studied the picture in silence, knitting his grey brows with a puzzled expression. Then he exclaimed emphatically,—
“That is not an American.”
“What do you think of the face?” I queried, anxiously.
“It is a wonderful face,” he answered,—“a very wonderful face. But it is not an American, nor an English face.”
“Spanish?” I suggested. “Or Italian?”
“No, no,” he returned, very positively. “It is not a European face at all.”