City and town life -- Fiction; Man-woman relationships -- Fiction
The visit to London was to Miss Alicia a period of enraptured delirium.
The beautiful hotel in which she was established, the afternoons at the
Tower, the National Gallery, the British Museum, the evenings at the
play, during which one saw the most brilliant and distinguished actors,
the mornings in the shops, attended as though one were a person of
fortune, what could be said of them? And the sacred day on which she
saw her Majesty drive slowly by, glittering helmets, splendid uniforms,
waving plumes, and clanking swords accompanying and guarding her, and
gentlemen standing still with their hats off, and everybody looking
after her with that natural touch of awe which royalty properly
inspires! Miss Alicia's heart beat rapidly in her breast, and she
involuntarily made a curtsey as the great lady in mourning drove by. She
lost no shade of any flavor of ecstatic pleasure in anything, and was to
Tembarom, who knew nothing about shades and flavors, indeed a touching
and endearing thing.
He had never got so much out of anything. If Ann had just been there,
well, that would have been the limit. Ann was on her way to America now,
and she wouldn't write to him or let him write to her. He had to make a
fair trial of it. He could find out only in that way, she said. It
was not to be denied that the youth and longing in him gave him some
half-hours to face which made him shut himself up in his room and stare
hard at the wall, folding his arms tightly as he tilted his chair.
There arrived a day when one of the most exalted shops in Bond Street
was invaded by an American young man of a bearing the peculiarities of
which were subtly combined with a remotely suggested air of knowing that
if he could find what he wanted, there was no doubt as to his power to
get it. What he wanted was not usual, and was explained with a frankness
which might have seemed unsophisticated, but, singularly, did not. He
wanted to have a private talk with some feminine power in charge, and
she must be some one who knew exactly what ladies ought to have.
Being shown into a room, such a feminine power was brought to him and
placed at his service. She was a middle-aged person, wearing beautifully
fitted garments and having an observant eye and a dignified suavity of
manner. She looked the young American over with a swift inclusion of
all possibilities. He was by this time wearing extremely well-fitting
garments himself, but she was at once aware that his tailored perfection
was a new thing to him.
He went to his point without apologetic explanation.
“You know all the things any kind of a lady ought to have,” he
said--“all the things that would make any one feel comfortable and as if
they'd got plenty? Useful things as well as ornamental ones?”
“Yes, sir,” she replied, with rising interest. “I have been in the
establishment thirty years.”
Public-domain text, read in full here on John Shaqi.
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