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
"Said she was afraid to. You’re to manage some way to see her to-night,
if you can, and she has a tip for you."
"H’m!" Granthope, with Fancy’s assistance, drew on the wig, and clapped
over his black satin skullcap with its red coral button atop. Then he
paused again reflectively.
"It must be something important. If I can only get hold of some good
scandal in this ’four hundred’ crowd I can have some fun with ’em."
"I should be afraid to trust these ladies’ maids; they might give you
away any time, and then where’d you be? That would be a pretty good
scandal, itself." Fancy shook her head.
"Aren’t they all in love with me?" he said, smiling grimly.
Fancy looked dubious. "That’s just the trouble. ’Hell hath no fury like
a woman scorned.’"
Granthope now laughed outright. "Fancy, when you get literary you’re
too funny for words."
She bridled, stuck out her little pointed tongue at him, and walked into
the front office, where she sat down to attend to some details of her
own work. At last she finished her writing and went to the closet to
put on her hat and jacket.
"Oh, Frank!" she called out.
"Yes, Fancy!"
"You don’t think I’m jealous, do you?"
"Yes!" he laughed.
She appeared at the doorway and called again:
"Mr. Granthope!" He was busy, and did not answer.
"Mr. Granthope!"
He looked up, now, to see her put her thumb to her nose with a playfully
derisive gesture, such as gamins use.
He put his head back and laughed.
Then she looked at him seriously, saying, "When I am, you’ll never know
it. I’m not afraid of ladies’ maids. When you really get into your own
class it will be time enough for me to worry. But I wish you wouldn’t
use those girls. They’re all cats, and they’ll scratch!"
She was standing before the mirror inside the closet door, with her hat
pin between her lips, adjusting her toque to the masses of her russet
hair, when there came a knock at the hall door. She looked round and
raised her eyebrows, then, after closing the door to the anteroom of the
studio, she called "Come in!"
Madam Spoll, in a black silk gown covered with a raglan, entered. She
wore a man’s small, low-crowned, Derby hat trimmed with a yellow bird’s
wing.
"How d’you do?" said Fancy, not too cordially.
"Good evening," Madam Spoll panted; then, as her breath was spent with
climbing the stairs, she dropped into a chair and gasped heavily. Fancy
went on with her preparations without further attention to her visitor.
"Frank in?" was Madam Spoll’s query as soon as she could breathe.
"Meaning Mr. Granthope?" said Fancy airily.
"You know who I mean well enough!" was her pettish reply.
"Oh, _do_ I?"—and Fancy, her costume now in readiness for the street,
walked jauntily into the anteroom and knocked at the door. "Madam Spoll
is here to see you," she called out.
"Just a moment," he answered.
Public-domain text, read in full here on John Shaqi.
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