“Oh, I’m sure I shall. Good day.”
She sat on the edge of the bed in the furnished room she had just rented, and her face had the look of the girl’s face in a little autotype of “The Soul’s Awakening through Books” that hung on the wall opposite her. At last her soul was awake; she could hear it whispering, whispering in her bosom. Or was that sound merely the exultation of her excited heart?
At any rate, her soul was awake. She knew it, she could feel it, and it made her tingle. At last she had broken her bonds, she had proclaimed herself a real person in a real world. Her doll existence and her doll-self were further behind than the doll’s house she had left. She was free—free to be herself, free to live her own life as her own desires decreed.
“Free! free!” she repeated under her breath. “Free!”
Her very presence gave a glamour to the shabby little room, so palpitating with life was she, so dainty and pretty and sweet, and so palpably young. The coils of her bright-brown hair were smooth and artfully simple, as only the fingers of an expert hair-dresser could have made them; her clear-skinned, brunette coloring showed the fine hand of nature given every chance to produce its best; the delicate, dark curves of her eyebrows, the carmine bows of her lips, the changing, liquid velvet of her gold-brown eyes, were masterpieces of the same supreme artist. She was as fair as an April morning that has somehow strayed into the luxuriance of June.
Suddenly she realized that the air in the little room was close, that the single tall window was closed top and bottom. With a quick rustle of silken draperies, she fluttered over to it and threw it wide. The sounds that came in were not the metallic tenor shriek of the “elevated,” the rumbling of wagons on cobblestones, the whining of surface cars: they were voices of the world. She held out her arms to them before returning to her perch on the bed.
There was such a dazzling host of things to be done that she could not begin to do anything. Her two big cowhide suitcases, standing in rather disdainful opulence beside the shabby chiffonier, invited her to unpack; but she dismissed the invitation with a toss of her head. How could she desecrate her first hour of freedom by putting clothing into bureau drawers? A mote-filled streak of sunshine, oblique with late afternoon, offered more congenial occupation. She let her eyes rest on it, and dreamed. It was pale golden, like hope, like the turrets of castles in Spain, like the wealth awaiting claimants at the foot of a rainbow. For a long time she looked into it, and her face put off its first flush of exultation for the wistful doubtfulness of reverie.
There was a knock at her door.
“Yes?” she answered.
“Your gentleman friend is a-waiting for you in the drawring-room, ma’am,” announced the landlady’s voice from outside.