Something of pain and protest in her voice made them desist. She was silent again, while Mariposa and Mrs. Willers arranged the details of the party. This was to be small and choice. Only one other person, a man referred to as Essex, was to come. At the name of Essex, Mrs. Willers shot a side look of inspection at Mariposa, who did what was expected of her in displaying a fine blush.
It was decided that Mrs. Willers’ hospitality should take the form of wine and cake. There was a consultation about other and lesser viands, and finally an animated discussion as to the proper garb in which Mariposa should present herself to the first truly distinguished person she had ever met. During the conversation over these varied questions Lucy lay back among her cushions, sunk in the same pale silence.
Darkness had fallen when the guest, having threshed out the subject to the last grain, took herself off. Mariposa looked from the opened doorway into a black street, dotted with the yellow blurs of lighted lamps. The air was cold with that penetrating, marrow-searching coldness of a foggy evening in San Francisco. As the night swallowed Mrs. Willers, Mariposa shut the door and came rushing back.
“Mother!” she cried, before she got into her room, “isn’t that the most thrilling thing? Oh, did you ever know of anything so unexpected and wonderful and exciting. Do you think he’ll like my voice? Do you think he really could be interested in me because he knew father? And he can’t have known him so very well, or father would have said more of him. Did you ever hear father speak about him?”
The mother gave no answer, and the girl bent over her. Lucy, motionless and white, was lying among her cushions, unconscious.
CHAPTER II
THE MILLIONAIRE
“And one man in his time plays many parts.”
—Shakespeare.
At two o’clock on the afternoon of her party Mrs. Willers was giving the finishing touches to her rooms. These were a sitting and bedroom in one of the large boarding-houses that already had begun to make their appearance along Sutter Street. “To reside” on Sutter Street, as she would have expressed it, was a step in fashion for Mrs. Willers, who previously had lived in such ignominious localities as North Beach and upper Market Street, renting the surplus rooms in dingy “private families.” Her rise to fairer fortunes was signalized by the move to Sutter Street. Her parlor announced it in its over-furnished brilliancy. All the best furniture of the poor lady’s many migrations had been squeezed into the little room. The Japanese fans and umbrellas, flattened against the walls with pins, were accumulated at some cost, for they represented one of those strange and unaccountable vagaries of popular taste that from time to time seize a community with blighting force. Silk scarfs were twisted about everything whereon they could twist.
The “lunch,” as the hostess called it, had already been prepared and stood on a side table. Edna, Mrs. Willers’ daughter, had made many trips up and down the street that morning collecting its component parts and bringing them home in paper bags. The ladies in the lower windows of the house had been aware of these goings and comings, and so were partly prepared when, at luncheon, Mrs. Willers casually told them of the distinguished guest she expected. The newspaper woman had not lived her life with her eyes shut and her ears closed, and she knew the value to the fraction of a hair of this information, and just how much it would add to her prestige.