A half-hour later they had found seats in front of the band stand in the park, and, settling themselves with a great rustling and preening of plumage, prepared to enjoy the music. Hannah and Pearl were given two chairs at the end of a row, and Hazel and Berny, with Josh as escort, secured four on the line immediately behind. Dominick had not yet appeared, so the sisters spread their skirts over a vacant seat between them, and Berny, in the intervals of inspecting the people around her, sent exploring glances about for the tall figure of her husband.
She was very fond of the park and band stand on such Sunday afternoons. To go there had been one of the great diversions of her girlhood. She loved to look at this holiday gathering of all types, among which her own class was largely represented. The outdoor amphitheater of filled benches was to her what the ball-room and the glittering horseshoe at the opera are to the woman of society. She saw many old friends among the throng, girls who had been contemporaries of hers when she had first “gone to work,” and had long since married in their own world and now dragged children by the hand. She looked them over with an almost passionate curiosity, discomfited to see the fresh youth of some, and pleased to note that others looked weighed down with maternal cares. Berny regarded women who had children as fools, and the children grouped about these mothers of her own age—three and four sometimes, with the husband carrying a baby—were to her only annoying, burdensome creatures that made the party seem a little ridiculous, and had not half the impressiveness or style of her elegant costume and lilac frills.
The magnificent afternoon had brought out a throng of people. Every seat in the lines of benches was full and foot passengers kept constantly coming up, standing for a few measures, and then moving on. They were of all kinds. The beauty of the day had even tempted the more fashionable element out, and the two sisters saw many elegantly-dressed ladies of the sort on whom Hazel fitted hats all day, and that evoked in Berny a deep and respectful curiosity. Both women, sitting high in their chairs, craned their necks this way and that, spying through breaks in the crowd, and following attractive figures with dodging movements of their heads. When either one saw anything she liked or thought interesting she laid a hand on the other’s knee, giving it a slight dig, and designated the object of her attention in a few broken words, detached and disconnected like notes for a sentence.
They were thus engaged when Hazel saw Dominick and, rising, hailed him with a beckoning hand. He made his way toward them, moving deliberately, once or twice pausing to greet acquaintances. He was taller than any man in the surrounding throng and Berny, watching him, felt a sense of proprietary pride swelling in her when she noted his superiority. The son of an Irish laborer and a girl who had begun life as the general servant in a miner’s boarding-house, he looked as if his forebears might have been the flower of the nation. He wore a loose-fitting suit of gray tweed, a wide, gray felt sombrero, and round his waist a belt of yellow leather. His collar turning back from his neck exposed the brown strength of his throat, and on lifting his hat in a passing salutation, his head with its cropped curly hair, the ears growing close against it, showed golden brown in the sunlight.
With a phrase of greeting he joined them, and then as they swept their skirts off the chair they had been hiding, slipped in front of Berny and sat down. Hazel began to talk to him. Her conversation was of a rallying, joking sort, at which she was quite proficient. Berny heard him laugh and knew by the tone of his voice that he was pretending and was not really amused. She had nothing particular to say to him, feeling that she had accomplished enough in inducing him to join them, and, sitting forward on the edge of her chair, continued to watch the people. A blonde coiffure some rows in front caught her eye and she was studying its intricacies through the interstices that came and went between the moving heads, when the sudden emergence into view of an unusually striking female figure diverted her attention. The woman had come up from behind and, temporarily stopped by the crowd, had come to a standstill a few rows in front of where the sisters sat. She was accompanied by a young man dressed in the Sunday dignity of frock-coat and silk hat. As he turned to survey the lines of filled chairs, Berny saw that he had a pale skin, a small black mustache, and dark eyes.
But her interest in him was of the slightest. Her attention was immediately riveted upon the woman, who became the object of a glance which inspected her with a piercing eagerness from her hat to the hem of her shirt. Berny could not see her face, but her habiliments were of the latest mode and of an unusual and subdued elegance which bespoke an origin in a more sophisticated center than San Francisco. Berny, all agog with curiosity, stared at the lady’s back, noting not only her clothes but a certain carelessness in the way they were put on. Her hat was not quite straight. The comb, which crossed the back of her head and kept her hair smooth, was crooked, and blonde wisps hung from it over her collar. The hand that held up her skirt in a loose perfunctory manner, as though these rich encasings were possessions of no moment, was covered by a not particularly clean white glove.
Such unconsciousness added the distinction of indifference to the already marked figure. Berny wondered more than ever who it was and longed to see the averted face. She was about to lean across Dominick and attract Hazel’s attention by a poking finger directed against her knee, when the woman, with a word to her companion, moved her head and let a slow glance sweep over the rows of faces.
“Hazel,” Berny hissed across Dominick, “look at that girl. Who is she?”
She did not divert her eyes from the woman’s face, which she now saw in profile. It was pretty, she thought, more from a rich, unmingled purity of coloring than from any particular beauty of feature. The head with its gravely-traveling glance continued to turn till Berny had the satisfaction of seeing the face in three-quarters. A moment later the moving eyes lighted indifferently on Hazel, then ceased to progress, suddenly, bruskly, as though checked by the imperative stoppage of regulating machinery.
Only a person watching closely would have noticed it, but Berny was watching with the most vigilant closeness. She saw the infusion of a new and keener interest transform the glance, concentrate its lazy, diffused attention into something that had the sharpness and suddenness of a leaping flame. The next moment a flood of color rose clearly pink over the face, and then, most surprising of all, the lady bent her head in a grave, deliberate bow.