"I am not laughing. I think the man a dangerous enemy and now he is my enemy. He will never forgive me for letting him make himself ridiculous. He is too righteous to forget a grudge, for any one who earns such a thing from the excellent Peter Winthrop Brewster Cuyler Ten Euyck becomes a criminal by that action. 'Winthrop.' Of course there had to be the New England strain—he was born to wear a steeple hat and snoop for witches! May he never light the faggots about me!"
"Now, my dear, you are working yourself up!"
"Dear mother, you are a bit hard to please! First you tell me not to laugh and then you reproach me with working myself up! But you are right! Why should I fash myself over a man with a personality like a pair of shears? Ah, if I could get news of Nancy, my hand would be steady enough!"
"You'll have news of Nancy when she gets ready!" declared Mrs. Hope, with the maternal freedom of speech toward our dearest friends, "An ungrateful, stubborn, secretive girl!"
"My mother," said Christina, "is enthusiastic but inaccurate. She means that Nancy is neither voluble nor impulsive, like the paragon before you, and that though her affection is steady it is not easily dazzled. We have been friends scarcely more than four years—since she made her first five dollars a week as part of a stage-mob—but I knew her at once for the little real sister of my heart. I told you I'd always been a lonely girl, Mr. Herrick, and that soft, little touch came close on my loneliness, like a child's. I have succeeded and she has not; I am the world's own daughter—I know the world and she does not; my hands are very keen, believe me, for the power and the glory—after all, one must have something!—and she can only put hers into mine. But where I am weak, she is strong. One can't ask one's family to forgive that!" said Christina. And with a tempestuous swoop she handed him a photograph upon which, whether for newspapers or detectives, had been pasted some memoranda. "This is more to the point."
He beheld a charming little face, fresh and pretty, quaintly feminine, with sensible and resolute brows to balance the wistfulness of the soft mouth; a face at once grave and glad, with a deep dimple softening the stubborn little chin. Herrick, studying the memoranda, compared them with his own vague memories and the photograph.
Height, five feet, four inches.
Weight, a hundred and twenty pounds.
Age, twenty years.
Complexion, fair.