VIII
She was lying on the bed when a relay of servants staggered in bearing gaudy piles of the most recent and popular novels, and placed them in tottering profusion upon the adjacent furniture.
The Lady Alene turned her head where it lay lazily pillowed on her left arm, and glanced indifferently at the multi-coloured battlement of books. The majority of the covers were embellished with the heads of young women, all endowed with vaudeville-like beauty—it having been discovered by intelligent publishers that a girl's head on any book sells it.
On some covers were displayed coloured pictures of handsome and athletic American young men, usually kissing beautiful young ladies who wore crowns, ermines, and foreign orders over dinner dresses. Sometimes, however, they were kicking Kings. That seemed rather odd to the Lady[70] Alene, and she sat up on the bed and reached out her hand. It encountered a book on which rested a small, oblong package. She took book and package. On the pink wrapper of the latter she read this verse:
Why are my teeth so white and bright?
Because I chew with all my might
The gum that fills me with delight
And keeps me healthy day and night.
Five cents.
The Lady Alene's unaccustomed fingers became occupied with the pink wrapper. Presently she withdrew from it a thin and brittle object, examined it, and gravely placed it in her mouth.
For a while the perplexed and apprehensive expression remained upon her face, but it faded gradually, and after a few minutes her lovely features settled into an expression resembling contentment. And, delicately, discreetly, at leisurely intervals, her fresh, sweet lips moved as though she were murmuring a prayer.
All that afternoon she perused the first American novel she had ever read. And the cumulative effect of the fiction upon her literal mind was amazing as she turned page after page, and, gradually gathering mental and nervous speed,[71] dashed from one chapter, bang! into another, only to be occultly adjured to "take the car ahead"—which she now did quite naturally, and on the run.
Never, never had she imagined such things could be! Always heretofore, to her, fiction had been a strict reflection of actuality in which a dull imagination was licensed to walk about if it kept off the grass. And it always did in the only novels to which she had been accustomed.
But good heavens! Here was a realism at work in these pages so astonishing yet so convincing, so subtle yet so natural, so matter of fact yet so astoundingly new to her that the book she was reading was already changing the entire complexion of the Yankee continent for her.