“No; they’re buying mines or railroads or something. Her husband’s in it, and all the others, they say, are English lords. That’s part of the syndicate with her now, in the box.”
“What part of the syndicate?” said Tod. “The head, or the feet, or the middle?”
“Don’t get gay, Tod,” said his sister, severely; “I don’t like small boys when they’re too funny. Down there in the audience, near the middle of the parquet, is the woman whose husband is something or other in Central America. He’s enormously rich, and she comes up here once a year and buys clothes. They say she used to be on the stage, and she looks just like it; she has such a lot of paint round her eyes and such vaudeville hair. But you ought to see her children! They’re quite black, just like little negroes. Major Conway, who lived down there a good deal, says that Central American children are all dark when they’re young, and then it wears off as they grow older.”
“Do they use sapolio?” inquired Tod.
Pearl treated this inquiry with fitting scorn, and continued:
“There’s Bertha Lajaune, over there by the pillar. Do you think she’s so beautiful? I must say I don’t. I heard the other day that she was a Jewess, and that her mother had one of those pawnbroking places south of Market Street, and that they’d only just moved away a few years when she married old Marcel Lajaune.”
As Pearl rattled on thus, assisted by Tod and Mrs. Gault, Letitia let her lorgnon follow on the track of their comments, idly passing from face to face as their light talk touched on it.
She looked curiously at the wife of the Mexican gambler, a romantically handsome woman, with a skin like a magnolia-petal, and a frame of ebony hair setting off a face of Madonna-like softness. The lady in the box above was not pretty at all, Letitia thought. She had a broad, good-humored red face, an impudent nose, and a frizz of blond hair crimped far down on her forehead in the English fashion. Her black evening dress showed a section of white neck, and a piece of reddened arm was visible between her short sleeves and the edge of her long gloves. Letitia had been too young to remember her as Tiny Madison, and wondered how a Californian could come to look so like a British princess.
The Central American lady was much more interesting. She was like a lily among the gipsy-looking dark women and small, beady-eyed men of her suite. She was thin, pale, and haggard, with artificially reddened hair and heavy eyelids much painted. Her eyes from under these looked out with an air of languid world-weariness. She had some immense diamonds round her throat, and the fan she lazily moved twinkled with them.
Letitia studied her for some interested minutes, then passed on to Bertha Lajaune, of whom everybody had heard and most people were talking. She was accounted by many the most beautiful woman in San Francisco, and had risen from an unpenetrated obscurity by her marriage with a rich French wine merchant. Letitia disagreed with Pearl. She thought Mme. Lajaune quite as beautiful as people said she was. To-night, in a gorgeous toilet of pale lavender with a good deal of silver and lace about it, she had the appearance of an ennuyéd princess. Her pale skin, classic features, and large light eyes, with an extraordinarily wide sweep of lid, seemed to stamp her as one designed by nature to wear a crown. Letitia was about to turn and draw John Gault’s attention to her, when the lorgnon, in its transit, suddenly commanded two faces just below—Colonel Reed’s and Viola’s.