As they turned into the arched doorway and began the ascent of the stairs, Mrs. Willers replied:
“I think that would be a very good idea, Mr. Shackleton. That is, if you can find the right woman.”
“Oh, I’ve got her now,” he answered, giving her a quick, side-long glance. “I think it would be a good arrangement for all parties. The Trumpet wants a Paris correspondent.”
The door leading into the press-rooms opened off the landing they had reached, and he turned into this with a word of farewell, and a hand lifted to his hat brim. Mrs. Willers continued the ascent alone. As she mounted upward she said to herself:
“The best thing for me to do is to get a French phrase book on the way home this evening, and begin studying: ‘Have you the green pantaloons of the miller’s mother?’”
The elation of his mood was still with Shackleton when, two hours later, he alighted from the carriage at the steps of his country house. He went upstairs to his own rooms with a buoyant tread. In his library, with the windows thrown open to the soft, scented air, he sat smoking and thinking. The October dusk was closing in, when he heard the wheels of a carriage on the drive and the sound of voices. His women-folk with the second of the Thurston girls—the one guest the house now contained—were returning from the afternoon round of visits that was the main diversion of their life during the summer months, and swept the country houses from Redwood City to Menlo Park.
It was a small dinner table that evening. Winslow had stayed in town over night, and Shackleton sat at the head of a shrunken board, with Bessie opposite him, his daughter to the left, and Pussy Thurston on his right. Pussy was Maud’s best friend and was one of the beauties of San Francisco. To-night she looked especially pretty in a pale green crape dress, with green leaves in her fair hair. Her skin was of a shell-like purity of pink and white, her face was small, with regular features and a sweet, childish smile.
She and her sister were the only children of the famous Judge Beauregard Thurston, in his day one of those brilliant lawyers who brought glory to the California bar. He had made a fortune, lived on it recklessly and magnificently, and died leaving his daughters almost penniless. He had been in the heyday of his splendor when Jake Shackleton, just struggling into the public eye, had come to San Francisco, and the proud Southerner had not scrupled to treat the raw mining man with careless scorn. Shackleton evened the score before Thurston’s death, and he still soothed his wounded pride with the thought that the two daughters of the man who had once despised him were largely dependent on his wife’s charity. Bessie took them to balls and parties, dressed them, almost fed them. The very green crape gown in which Pussy looked so pretty to-night had been included in Maud’s bill at a fashionable dressmaker’s.
Personally he liked Pussy, whose beauty and winning manners lent a luster to his house. Once or twice to-night she caught him looking at her with a cold, debating glance in which there was little of the admiration she was accustomed to receiving since the days of her first long dress.
He was in truth regarding her critically for the first time, for the Bonanza King was a man on whom the beauty of women cast no spell. He was comparing her with another and a more regally handsome girl. Pussy Thurston would look insipid and insignificant before the stately splendor of his own daughter.