Along the wide straight street of the city surged the usual shopping
crowd. Largely petticoated was it, for o'daytimes man must be busy at
his office that woman may have this privilege of going shopping. Surely
there is no other stream in the wide world that is so monotonous as this
human never-ending current. The same types, the same clothes, the same
subjects of conversation in the fragments that catch the ear. And seldom
does one see a face that looks even cheerful, much less happy,--all
intent on matching ribbons.
"The world is too much with us; late and soon;
Getting and spending we lay waste our powers."
Thus might they cry aloud, if they were condemned to proclaim their
sins, like the long banner of bat-like souls that Dante saw passing in
similar fashion beneath his eye.
And yet, in spite of its monotony, humanity is perennially interesting
to itself. Therefore among the strenuous, the hurrying, and the
anxious-eyed, one girl loitered on dilatory foot from wide window to
wide window.
"Girl" seems an inadequate word to describe Lena Quincy. It may be
applied to any youthful feminine person, and Lena, in spite of her
carefully-groomed shabbiness, was by no means one of the herd. She
affected one like a bit of Tiffany glass, shimmering, iridescent,
ethereal; and no ugliness in her surroundings could take away that
impression.
Every one who looked at her at all looked twice. She had grown so used
to this tribute that it hardly affected her unless it came from one who
merited her interest in return.
Now she was wandering from one to another of the ladies with the waxen
faces, the waxen hands and the wooden hearts, who gazed back unmoved
from behind their plate-glass; though it was not the fixed and amiable
smiles of the lay-figures that caught her attention, but rather the
curious way in which this one's braid was laid on the gown, or the new
device in buttons, there beyond.
Now she turned and studied the human flux in front. She was not
shopping, save in sweet imagination. This was her theater, and she was
fain to make the show last as long as possible. Her absorbent gaze saw
everything. Yet it was selective too, for it passed swiftly over the
chaff of the shabby and fixed itself on the wheat of the properly
gowned. Sometimes she wove romances about her swiftly-disappearing
actors, romances not of heart and soul but of garments, of splendors and
of money; but even such entrancing tissues of her brain vanished like
pricked soap-bubbles when there passed in the body one of those select
few whose skirts proclaimed perfection. Could dreams stand against
reality? Yet the dreams were blissful, though, when they were gone, the
girl was left steeped in the bitterness of envy.
It is said that there is a consolation in being well-dressed that
religion itself can not afford. It is to be remembered that there is
also the pharisaism which always forms a hard shell about every kernel
of religion; and the pharisaism of the correct costume is the most
complacent of all forms of self-righteousness. Lena's lips grew
positively pale as she saw it pass, drawing its rustling petticoats
close to its side. She hungered and thirsted for this form of
righteousness.