It made her boil with rage to think of them all, with Dominick at their head, getting everything they wanted and sending her off to Paris, even though Paris might be delightful, and she have a great deal better time there than she ever had in San Francisco.
All these thoughts were in her mind as she walked down town one afternoon for her usual diversion of shopping and promenading. Of late she had not been sleeping well and the fear that this would react upon her looks had spurred her to the unwonted exertion of walking. The route she had chosen was one of those thoroughfares which radiate from Market Street, and though not yet slums, are far removed from the calm, wide gentility of the city’s more dignified highways. With all her cleverness, she had never shaken off the tastes and instincts of the class she had come from. She felt more at home in this noisy byway, where children played on the pavements and there were the house-to-house intimacies, the lack of privacy, of the little town, than she did on the big, clean-swept streets where the houses presented a blank exterior to the gaze, and most of the people were transported in cars or carriages. Even the fact that the Tenderloin was in close proximity did not modify her interest with a counteracting disgust; though she was not one of the women who have a lively curiosity as to that dark side of life, it did not, on the other hand, particularly repel her. She viewed it with the same practical utilitarianism with which she regarded her own virtue. That possession had been precious to her for what she could gain with it. When she had sacrificed it to her ambition, she had not liked giving it up at all, but had reconciled herself to doing so because of the importance of the stake involved.
Walking loiteringly forward she crossed Powell Street, and approached the entrance of that home of vaudeville, the Granada Theater. This was a place of amusement that she much favored, and of which she was a frequent patron. Dominick did not like it, so she generally went to the matinée with one of her sisters. There had been a recent change of bill, and as she drew near she looked over the posters standing by the entrance on which the program for the coming week was printed in large letters. Midway down one of these, her eye was caught by a name and she paused and stood reading the words:
“JAMES DEFAY BUFORD
The Witty, Brilliant and Incomparable
Monologist
In His Unrivaled Monologue
Entitled
KLONDIKE MEMORIES”
She remembered at once that this was the actor Dominick had spoken of as having been snowed in with them at Antelope. Dominick had evidently not expected he would come to San Francisco. He had said the man had been going to act in Sacramento. After standing for some moments looking at the words, she moved on again with the short, mincing step that was habitual to her, and which always made walking a slow and undesirable mode of progression. She seemed more thoughtful than she had been before she saw the program, and for some blocks her face wore an absent and somewhat pensive air of musing.
Her preoccupation lasted up Grant Avenue and down Post Street till it was finally dispelled by the sight of that attractive show-window in which a large dry-goods establishment exhibits the marvels of new millinery. It was April, and the spring fashions were just in from Paris, filling the window with a brilliant display of the newest revolutionary modes of which San Francisco had so far only heard. Women stood staring, some dismayed at the introduction of styles which they felt would have a blighting, not to say obliterating effect on their own beauty. Others, of practical inclinations, studied the new gowns with an eye to discoveries whereby their wardrobes might be induced to assume a deceptive air of second youth.
Berny elbowed her way in among them and pressed herself close to the glass, exploring, with a strained glance, the intricacies of back draperies turned from view. She wished Hazel was there with her. Hazel was wonderfully sharp at seeing how things were put together, and could carry complications of trimming and design in her head without forgetting them or getting them mixed. The discovery that skirts were being cut in a new way gave Berny a shock of painful surprise, especially when she thought of her raspberry crape, still sufficiently new to be kept in its own box between layers of tissue paper, and yet at the stage when the necessity of paying for it was at a comfortable, unvexing distance.
She was standing with her back to the street when a woman next her gave a low exclamation and uttered the name of Mrs. Con Ryan. Berny wheeled about just as the exceedingly smart victoria of Mrs. Cornelius Ryan drew up at the curb and that august matron prepared to descend from it. In these afternoon shopping excursions she had often met her mother-in-law, often met her and invariably seen her turn her head and fix her eyes in the opposite direction. Now, however, matters were on another footing. If Mrs. Ryan had not recognized Berny, or spoken to her, or received her, she had at least opened negotiations with her, negotiations which presupposed a knowledge of her existence if not a desire for her acquaintance. Berny did not go so far as to anticipate a verbal greeting, but she thought, in consideration of recent developments, she was warranted in expecting a bow.
She moved forward almost in Mrs. Ryan’s path, paused, and then looked at the large figure moving toward her with a certain massive stateliness. This time Mrs. Ryan did not turn her head away. Instead, she looked at the young woman directly and steadily, looked at her full in the eye with her own face void of all recognition, impassive and stonily unmoved as the marble mask of a statue. Berny, her half-made bow checked as if by magic, her face deeply flushed, walked on. She moved down the street rapidly, her head held high, trembling with indignation.
Such are the strange, unaccountable contradictions of the female character that she felt more incensed by this cut than by any previous affront or slight the elder woman had offered her. The anticipated bow, neither thought of nor hoped for till she had seen Mrs. Ryan alighting from the carriage, was suddenly a factor of paramount importance in the struggle between the two. So small a matter as a nod of the elder woman’s head would have made the younger woman more pliable, more tractable and easily managed, than almost any other action on her mother-in-law’s part. Berny, bowed to, would have been a more docile, reasonable person than either Mrs. Ryan or Bill Cannon had had yet to deal with; while Berny, cut, flamed up into a blaze of mutinous fury that, had they known it, would have planted dismay in the breasts of those bold conspirators.