"I should be ashamed to be silly about fellows, the way some girls are,"
was her inward comment. "But I'd just like to have people see me with a
thing like that dangling around me. And I shall, some time. I'm a whole
heap prettier than she is."
The carriage door shut abruptly. Lena's too thin boots, out of plumb,
suddenly slipped on a half-formed piece of ice. She made a desperate
grab at the smooth surface of the window and then came ignominiously
down--not wholly ignominiously, however, since her accident brought to
her aid the man who was a type.
She didn't have to stop to consider that the man would notice neither
her hat nor her boots. She knew it instinctively and instantly. But the
rose-petal face and the big eyes were overwhelmingly present to her
consciousness. She saw them reflected in the look on his face as he bent
over her.
"I hope you're not hurt."
"Not in the least. Only humiliated." Lena smiled, because people are
always attracted by cheerfulness.
"You are sure you have not twisted your ankle?" he insisted.
"Nothing but my hat and my hair," she pouted. "Thank you for coming to
my rescue."
"It wasn't much of a rescue," he said.
"Are you sorry I didn't have a tragedy and give you a chance to play
hero?" she inquired naïvely.
"When you are in need, may I be the one to help?" he said with growing
boldness.
Lena flushed and nodded as he lifted his hat and was gone. She walked
slowly homeward, actually forgetting to stop at her favorite window in
the lace store, so occupied was she with the latest story she was
telling herself. It was a story in which a large house with soft rugs
and becoming pink lights occupied the foreground, and somewhere in the
background hovered a man who was a type and who loved to spend money on
diamonds. The vision was so lovable that she lived with it all the way,
even through the narrow entrance of the lodging-house and up the narrow
stairs, saturated with obsolete smells--smells of dead dinners--to the
very instant when she opened the upper door and faced bald reality and
her mother. Mrs. Quincy sat by the window in a room on the walls of
which the word "shabby" was written in a handwriting as plain, and in
language far simpler than ever Belshazzar saw on the walls of Babylon.
It fairly cried itself from the big-figured paper, peeling along its
edges; from the worn painted floor; from the frayed rug of now
patternless carpet; from the sideboard that looked like a parlor organ.
Even from the closet door it whispered that there was more shabbiness
hidden in the depths.
Mrs. Quincy herself was a part of it, for she was to Lena what the faded
rose is to the opening one, a once beautiful woman, whose skin now
looked like wrinkled cream.