Up to this time he had regarded her only as a handsome girl, a bit more unaffected and humorous than the general run, but now he felt a much keener interest. She had something to say—an intriguing oddity among women. Who was this girl, with her dark red hair in bobbed curls, and her jaunty, Irish-looking face, and her words divided between whimsicality and hopelessness? Perhaps she was a talented person, well-known in her profession and amusing herself with this posture of half-smiling and half darkly wistful obscurity.
“You’re probably quite famous and rebuking me for not having heard of you,” he said, after a pause.
“I don’t think Madame Jaurette would agree with you,” she answered, smiling.
“Mother or dancing partner?”
“She owns the Beauty Parlor where I work—I’m just a common hair-dresser, that’s all.”
He looked closely at her—was she persistently jesting?
“No fooling—come clean,” he said. “You’re not really.”
“Oh, I know, I’m not like my type,” she answered. “I think a little, and I don’t use slang very often, though I like it sometimes. Don’t be deceived so easy.”
“Well, I’ll bet you’re trying to do something different, anyway,” he said, convinced now that she was telling the truth and engrossed in this phenomenon of a seemingly intelligent and searching Beauty Shop girl. “You could tell me you were a scrubwoman and I’d still know instinctively that your job had nothing to do with your ambitions. It’s in all your words and all the expressions on your face.”
She felt glad that his response had not been one of veiled pity, or sexy flattery, or the polite ending of interest, and her heart began to quicken its strokes. Say, could he be the man that she had been looking for? Could he? Silly, oh, very silly dream, and one that could scarcely be changed to a proven reality by a few beginning and possibly misleading words, and yet ... she was attracted by his appearance—stalwart and yet subdued, with no “fizz” about it—and she liked immensely everything he said.