"Who is this?" echoed papa. "Why, this is my great West Indian magnolia, my Cleopatra in light colors, my"——
"Hush, you silly man!"
"This is she," putting his hands on my shoulders,—"Miss Giorgione
Willoughby."
By this time he had found his manners.
"Miss Giorgione Willoughby," he said, with a cool bow, "I never knew you."
"Very well, Sir," I retorted. "Now you and my father have settled the question, know my amber!" and lifting it again, it got caught in that curl.
I have good right to love my hair. What was there to do, when it snarled in deeper every minute, but for him to help me? and then, at the friction of our hands, the beads gave out slightly their pungent smell that breathes all through the Arabian Nights, you know; and the perfumed curls were brushing softly over his fingers, and I a little vexed and flushed as the blind blew back and let in the sunshine and a roistering wind;—why, it was all a pretty scene, to be felt then and remembered afterward. Lu, I believe, saw at that instant how it would be, and moved away to do as papa had asked; but no thought of it came to me.
"Well, if you can't clear the tangle," I said, "you can see the beads."
But while with delight he examined their curious fretting, he yet saw me.
I am used to admiration now, certainly; it is my food; without it I should die of inanition; but do you suppose I care any more for those who give it to me than a Chinese idol does for—whoever swings incense before it? Are you devoted to your butcher and milkman? We desire only the unpossessed or unattainable, "something afar from the sphere of our sorrow." But, though unconsciously, I may have been piqued by this manner of his. It was new; not a word, not a glance; I believed it was carelessness, and resolved—merely for the sake of conquering, I fancied, too—to change all that. By-and-by the beads dropped out of the curl, as if they had been possessed of mischief and had held there of themselves. He caught them.