Mrs. Angel's spirits were visibly dampened by this unfeeling allusion. Her beaming face darkened.
"They has to take their resks," she remarked, sententiously, after a long pause, fingering her hard-rubber bracelets, and avoiding my gaze.
Once I met her on the Avenue. She was issuing from a popular restaurant, followed by four or five young Angels, all in high spirits and beaming with the consciousness of well-filled stomachs, and the possession of divers promising-looking paper bags. She greeted me with an effusiveness which drew upon me the attention of the passers-by.
"We've done had oyshters!" remarked John Henry.
"'N' ice-cream 'n' cakes!" supplemented Rosy.
The fond mother exhibited, with natural pride, their "tin-types," taken individually and collectively, sitting and standing, with hats and without. The artist had spared neither carmine nor gilt-foil, and the effect was unique and dazzling.
"I've ben layin' off ter have 'em took these two year," she loudly exclaimed, "an' I've done it! He'll be mad as a hornet, but I don't keer! He don't pay fur 'em!"
A vision of the long-suffering grocer and merchant rose between me and those triumphs of the limner's art, but then, as Mrs. Angel herself had philosophically remarked, "they has to take their resks."
Phenie, too, in the beginning, was a frequent visitor, and I was pleased to note that her painful shyness was wearing off a little, and to see a marked improvement in her dress. There was, with all her childishness, a little trace of coquetry about her,—the innocent coquetry of a bird preening its feathers in the sunshine. She was simply a soft-hearted, ignorant little beauty, whose great, appealing eyes seemed always asking for something, and in a way one might find it hard to refuse.