Left alone, the beauty rubbed her forehead impatiently, and pouted for a few minutes. Then she took out a small case of crimson velvet from her pocket and opened it; it was a framed and highly colored photograph of herself, on porcelain, and set in gilt, with small jewels inlaid in the frame. As she looked upon it, her mouth unbent at the corners, her lips came back to their usual roguish, fascinating curves. She laid aside her dress, and robed in a splendid pink-and-lilac négligé, unbound her hair and sat for a long time before the glass, looking from it to the miniature and back again to the original. Then she took out a letter and read its contents, still smiling.
And then, for the first time that evening, you might have seen a resemblance—to what? Why, for all the world—as she sat with her yellow hair falling on her full neck, with the contented, infantine smile, and the fashionably cut robe-de-chambre—for all the world, like Mrs. Flossie Gower.
CHAPTER XIII.
UNA AND THE LION.
JOHN HAVILAND was a banker down-town, a man of much business and of few intimate friends. He was over thirty at this time, and made no sign of getting married; which was the stranger, as his health was good, his wealth sufficient, and he cared less for the pleasures of life than for its happiness. He had no brothers nor sisters; his mother was a widow and he lived with her. Flossie said it was hard to get interested in such people as John Haviland.
Every afternoon at four he left his office and went on a long and solitary walk; thus his days were of a piece with his life. He never chose the conventional promenades: and through the outlying districts, the river villages, the Bowery, the forgotten little parks and green places; by Riverside and Morningside; through the mysterious Greenwich settlement, as well as Central Park, Morrisania, and Fort Washington; in any sort of weather—sleet, snow, rain, or freeze—you might have met the man, striding along like a well-oiled engine, observant of everything, from the street urchins to the signs in the shop-windows. This at an hour of day when he might have gone to teas; wherefore people said he had never been in love. Which is a rash predication of your chimney-sweeper, but happened to be true of Haviland.
One day his wandering took a direction beyond Washington Square. This most characteristic of all New York squares lies bounded on the north by Belgravia, on the west by Bohemia, on the east by Business, and on the south by Crime. West of it are rich districts of individuality, where the bedrock of shabby gentility develops occasional lodes and pockets for the student of humanity. It is a place where the deserving and the undeserving poor are huddled together, both of them inefficient, but neither wicked; and where all the inhabitants make some sort of incoherent struggle against the facts of life, and either, on the one hand, emulate respectability, or, on the other, excuse themselves with the divine license to vagabondage given by Art.
In one of the southernmost and more dubious of these streets, Haviland, steaming along with his mind on everything and a watch on deck—for he was no introspective Hamlet—noticed a group of hulking fellows ahead of him. They were the sort of persons that have no obvious function in the divine economy; persons whose principal end seems to be to get knocked on the head with clubs in street riots, thereby dying, at least, with some poetic justice. Haviland would not have ordinarily noticed them; but he was struck by their unwonted rapidity of motion, and looking, he saw that they were following something; that something being a graceful female figure, dressed in black. John Haviland swung promptly into line behind them; and gaining more rapidly upon them than they upon the lady, he sauntered innocently between two of them when she was still a few dozen yards in front of them. He glanced casually at them as he passed; they slunk away like beaten dogs, and melted, in divers directions, from sight.
In a moment more they had reached a broader street; and John was on the point of diverging his course again from that of his protégée, when, looking at her, he hesitated a second, and then walked rapidly up to her.
“Miss Holyoke?” said he, raising his hat and with an unavoidable shade of surprise in his tone.