It so happened that this little conversation set Win’s mind once more to thinking of the girl his father had been so determined to find and benefit. As he left The Trumpet office, shortly after the withdrawal of Mrs. Willers, his mind was full of the queries the finding of the letters had aroused in it. The handsome girl he had seen that afternoon, three months ago, appeared before his mental vision, and this time as her face flashed out on him from the dark places of memory it had a sudden tantalizing suggestion of familiarity. The question came that so often teases us with the sudden glimpse of a vaguely recognized face: “Where have I seen it before?”
Win walked slowly up Third Street meditating under a spread umbrella. It was raining hard now, a level downpour that beat pugnaciously on the city, which gleamed and ran rillets of water under the onslaught. People were scurrying away in every direction, women with umbrellas low against their heads, one hand gripping up their skirts, from beneath which came and went glimpses of muddy boots and wet petticoats. Loafers were standing under eaves, looking out with yellow, apathetic faces. The merchants of the quarter came to the doorways of the smaller shops that Win passed, and stood looking out and then up into the sky with musing smiles. It was a heavy rain, and no mistake.
Win had a commission to execute before he went home, and so passed up Kearney Street to Post, where, a few doors from the corner, he entered a photographer’s. He was having a copy made on ivory of an old daguerreotype of his father, to be given as a present to his mother, and to-day it was to be finished.
The photographer, a clever and capable man, had started the innovation of having his studio roughly lined with burlaps, upon which photographs of local belles and celebrities were fastened with brass-headed nails. Win, waiting for his appearance, loitered round the room looking at these, recognizing a friend here, and there a proud beauty who had endured him as a partner at the cotillion because he was the only son of Jake Shackleton. Farther on was one of Edna Willers, looking very lovely and seraphic in her large-eyed innocence.
On a small slip of wall between two windows there was only one picture fastened, and as his eye fell on this he started. It was Mariposa Moreau, in the lace dress she had worn at the opera, the face looking directly and gravely into his. At the moment that his glance, fresh from other faces, fell on it, the haunting suggestion of familiarity, of having some intimate connection with or memory of it, possessed him with sudden, startling force. Of whom did she remind him?
He backed away from it, and, as he did so, was conscious that he knew exactly the way her lips would open if she had been going to speak, of the precise manner she had of lifting her chin. Yet he had seen her only twice in his life that he knew of, and then in the half-dark. It was not she that was known to him, but some one that she looked like—some one he knew well, that had some vague, yet close connection with his life. He felt in an eery way that his mind was gropingly approaching the solution, had almost seized it, when the photographer’s voice behind him broke the thread.
“It will be ready in a moment, Mr. Shackleton,” he said. “You’re looking at that picture. It’s a Miss Moreau, a young lady who, I believe, is a singer. I put it there by itself, as I was just a little proud of it.”
“It’s a stunning picture and no mistake,” said Win, arranging his glasses, “but it must be easy to make a picture of a girl like that.”
“On the contrary, I think it’s hard. Miss Moreau’s handsome, but it’s a beauty that’s more suitable to a painter than a photographer. It’s the coloring that’s so remarkable, so rich and yet so refined—that white skin and dark red hair. That’s why I am proud of the picture. It suggests the coloring, I think. It seems to me there’s something warm about that hair.”
Win said vaguely, yes, he guessed there must be, wondering what the fellow meant about there being something warm about the hair. Further comment was ended by an attendant coming forward with the picture and handing it to the photographer.