He raised the article to examine it more closely, and to his amazement it unfolded and lengthened out. It was not a handkerchief at all. It was a lady's stocking—a brilliant purple stocking!
Maxwell wondered. "Washing's been mixed," he said, and then devoted closer and more earnest attention to his prize. It was a charming affair, small of foot but not too small otherwise, and possessed, somehow, an especial symmetry, even in its present state.
"It's number eight—number three shoe," thought Maxwell, "and it's the prettiest stocking I ever saw."
His comment was fully justified. The stocking was a dream in its department of lingerie. The purple was relieved, from the ankle upward a little way, by a clocking of snow-white sprays of lilies-of-the-valley, and the purple itself was of such a hue as to send one dreaming of the glories of the ancients. It was a wonderful stocking, a fascinating stocking. It lured like a will-o'-the wisp.
Maxwell abandoned his packing and sat stroking and admiring the hypnotizing object. He became vastly interested. "I wonder whom it belongs to?" he mused. Then—there's no explaining it with authority, and discreetly—a sudden fancy seized upon him. "I'll not leave to-night!" he said, "I'll find the owner of that stocking! It will give me something to do and add a little zest to things. Might as well be stocking-hunting as anything else. By Jove, what a neat little foot she must have!"
The packing was left undone. The man had an object now, one which might have seemed trivial to the bloodless and unimaginative, but which to him became a serious matter. Talk about the Round Table fellows after the Holy Grail or Diogenes after an honest man, they were not in it with Maxwell! He dawdled and mooned over that stocking and made and unmade plans. He bribed a gentleman, youthful and dirty, connected with the laundry department of the hotel, and it came to naught. His gaze was ever downward. He appeared more frequently on the piazza among the scores of "porchers" engaged in idle converse there. He strolled along the little beach, ever with furtive eyes on twinkling feet, and neat ones he saw galore and stockings rainbow-hued galore, but never a purple one among them.
It was the quality of the purple, he decided, which must have so enthralled him in the first place. He had never seen a purple like it. He read up on purples. He learned that royal purple is made up of fifty-five parts red, twelve parts blue and thirty-three parts black, and concluded that the stocking must be almost a royal purple, so wonderfully did the white lilies show out against its richness. Tyrian purple he rejected as being too dull for the comparison. Then he considered the purple of Amorgos, the wonderfully brilliant color obtained from the seaweed of the Grecian island, and this met with greater favor in his eyes. He decided, finally, that the hue of the stocking was between the royal and the purple of Amorgos, and this relieved his mind. But this didn't help him to find the girl—and how vain a thing is even the most beautiful stocking in the world without a girl attached!
Then the unexpected happened as usual. There came a lapse in the search. The cure for Maxwell's dream was homeopathic. Like cures like. One girl blighted most of interest in the vague search for another. Maxwell was caught by the concrete. Miss Ward, a guest of the hotel, in company with her aunt, was not, Maxwell decided, like any of the other women. She was dignified, but piquant, pretty, certainly, and well educated. Likewise, she had self-possession and much wit. Maxwell enjoyed her society and they became close friends. He began to feel as if the world, if hollow, had at least a substantial crust. He was no longer bored and the stocking fancy was put aside.
Then came Farrington. Farrington had spirits. He lightened up the hotel piazza and flirted with every one, from dowagers down to the little girls to whom he told liver-colored stories as evening and the gloom came. He was deeply interested when Maxwell told him of the stocking and the marvel. He became full of ardor.
"Don't give up the search!" he expostulated. "Such a stocking as that must belong to the one woman in four hundred and eighty-three thousand. Why, it's like finding a nugget in a valley! There's bound to be gold in the mountains!"