She pressed Mrs. Moreau’s hand and then sent an eagle glance—the glance of the reporter that is trained to take in every salient object in one sweep—about the room. She could have written a good description of it from that moment’s survey.
“Better? Of course you’re better,” she interrupted Lucy, who had been speaking of improved health. “Don’t San Francisco cure everybody? And daughter there?” her bright tired eye rested on Mariposa for one inspecting moment. “She looks nice enough to eat.”
“Mariposa’s always well,” said Lucy, pressing the hand she still held. “She was always a prize child ever since she was a baby.”
Mrs. Willers leaned back and folded her white-gloved hands over her creaking waist.
“You know she’s the handsomest thing I’ve seen in a coon’s age,” she said, nodding her head at Mariposa. “There ain’t a girl in society that compares to her.”
Lucy smiled indulgently at her daughter. Mariposa, though embarrassed, was not displeased by these sledge-hammer compliments. They were a novelty to her, and she regarded Mrs. Willers—despite a few peculiarities of style—as a woman of vast knowledge and experience in that wonderful world of gaiety and fashion, of which she herself knew so little.
“I go to most of the big balls here,” continued the visitor. “It’s always the same thing on The Trumpet—‘Send up Mrs. Willers to the Cotillion Club to-night; we don’t want any other reporter but her. If you send up any of those other jay women we’ll turn ’em down.’ So up I have to hop. The other night at the Lorley’s big blow-out, when Genevieve Lorley had her début, it was the same old war-cry—‘We want Mrs. Willers to-night to do the Society, and don’t try and work off any incompetents on us. Send her up early so’s Mrs. Lorley can give her the dresses herself.’ So up I went, and was in the dressing-room for an hour and saw ’em all, black and white and brown, heiresses and beggars, and not one of ’em, Mrs. Moreau, to touch daughter here—not one.”
“But there are so many beautiful girls in San Francisco. Mariposa has seen them on the cars and down town. She often tells me of them.”
“Beauties—yes, lots of ’em; dead loads of ’em. But there’s a lot that get their beauty out of boxes and bottles. There’s a lot—I don’t say who, I’m not one to mention names—but there’s a lot that when they go to bed the beauty all comes off and lies in layers on the floor. Not that I blame them—make yourself as good-looking as you can, that’s my motto. It’s every woman’s duty. But you don’t want to begin so young. I rouge myself,” said Mrs. Willers, with the careless truthfulness of one whose reputation is beyond attack, “but I don’t like it in a young girl.”
“Who was the prettiest girl at the ball?” said Mariposa, deeply interested. She had the curiosity of seventeen on such subjects—subjects of which her girlhood had been unusually barren.