The Heart Line: A Drama of San FranciscoBurgess, Gelett
General
The Heart Line: A Drama of San Francisco
Burgess, Gelett
Bohemianism -- Fiction; Fortune-tellers -- Fiction; San Francisco (Calif.) -- Fiction
Fancy lived in a three-story house on O’Farrell, Street, near Jones
Street, a place back from the sidewalk, with a garden in front and on
one side. Fancy had a room on the attic floor, with two dormer windows
giving upon the front yard. As Granthope turned in the gate and looked
up at her windows, he was surprised to see one of them raised. Fancy’s
arm appeared, a straw hat in her hand. The next instant the hat sailed
gracefully out into the air, curving like an aeroplane. It dropped
nearly at his feet. He picked it up, thinking that she would look out
after it, but instead, the sash was lowered.
A minute afterward a young man, bareheaded, and apparently violently
enraged, appeared at the front door. Granthope walked up and presented
the hat to Mr. Gay P. Summer, who took it, staring, without a word of
thanks, and stalked sulkily away.
The door being left open, Granthope walked up three flights of stairs
and knocked at Fancy’s room. There was no reply. He called to her. The
door was instantly flung open.
"Why, hello, Frank! Excuse me. I thought it was my meal-ticket coming
back to bore me to death again." Fancy began to laugh. "You ought to
have seen him. He simply wouldn’t go, after I’d given him twenty-three
gilt-edged tips, and so I had to throw his hat out of the window to get
rid of him."
"I saw him. I think he won’t come back. He looked rather
uncomfortable."
Fancy sat down on the bed unconcernedly, clasping her hands on her
crossed knees, while Granthope took a seat upon a trunk.
"Say, Frank, these people who expect to annex all your time and pay for
it in fifty cent _table d’hotes_ are beginning to make me tired.
There’s nothing so expensive as free dinners, I’ve found! The minute
you let a man buy you a couple of eggs, he thinks he’s in a position to
dictate to you for the rest of eternity. Why, one dinner means he’s
hired you till eleven o’clock, and I run out of excuses long before
that. No, you don’t get anything free in this world, and many a girl’s
found _that_ out!"
Granthope smiled. Fancy was at her prettiest, with a whimsical
animation that he knew of old. Nothing delighted him so much as Fancy
in her semi-philosophic vein.
She ran on: "Gay has just proposed to me again—I’ve lost tally, now.
The one good thing about him is that he’s always ready to make good with
the ring whenever I say the word. He takes me seriously just because I
never explain. But all the encouragement I’ve ever given him is to
accept. Gay’s the kind that always calls you ’Little girl,’ no matter
how high you are, and tells you you’re ’brave’! There’s no one quite
like you, Frank—"
As she spoke, her gaiety slowly oozed away, till she sat almost
plaintively watching him. Then she smiled and shook her head slowly.
"Don’t get frightened, I won’t do anything foolish." She sprang up and
tossed her head. Then, turning to him, she said: "Say, Frank, do you
know Blanchard Cayley?"
Public-domain text, read in full here on John Shaqi.
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