As she answered, he was occupied with noting the faintest hint of
bronze--perhaps a trick of the light--in her long, brown lashes.
Perforce, he lifted his gaze to her eyebrows, brown, delicately
stenciled, and made sure that the hint of bronze was there. Still
lifting his gaze to her high-piled hair, he again saw, but more
pronounced, the bronze note glinting from the brown-golden hair. Nor
did he fail to startle and thrill to a dazzlement of smile and teeth
and eye that frequently lived its life in her face. Hers was no thin
smile of restraint, he judged. When she smiled she smiled all of
herself, generously, joyously, throwing the largess of all her being
into the natural expression of what was herself and which domiciled
somewhere within that pretty head of hers.
"Yes," she was saying. "They have never to worry, as long as they live,
over mere bread and butter. Dick is most generous, and, rather immoral,
in his encouragement of idleness on the part of men like them. It's a
funny place, as you'll find out until you come to understand us.
They... they are appurtenances, and--and hereditaments, and such
things. They will be with us always until we bury them or they bury us.
Once in a while one or another of them drifts away--for a time. Like
the cat, you know. Then it costs Dick real money to get them back.
Terrence, there--Terrence McFane--he's an epicurean anarchist, if you
know what that means. He wouldn't kill a flea. He has a pet cat I gave
him, a Persian of the bluest blue, and he carefully picks her fleas,
not injuring them, stores them in a vial, and turns them loose in the
forest on his long walks when he tires of human companionship and
communes with nature.
"Well, only last year, he got a bee in his bonnet--the alphabet. He
started for Egypt--without a cent, of course--to run the alphabet down
in the home of its origin and thereby to win the formula that would
explain the cosmos. He got as far as Denver, traveling as tramps
travel, when he mixed up in some I. W. W. riot for free speech or
something. Dick had to hire lawyers, pay fines, and do just about
everything to get him safe home again.
"And the one with a beard--Aaron Hancock. Like Terrence, he won't work.
Aaron's a Southerner. Says none of his people ever did work, and that
there have always been peasants and fools who just couldn't be
restrained from working. That's why he wears a beard. To shave, he
holds, is unnecessary work, and, therefore, immoral. I remember, at
Melbourne, when he broke in upon Dick and me, a sunburnt wild man from
out the Australian bush. It seems he'd been making original researches
in anthropology, or folk-lore-ology, or something like that. Dick had
known him years before in Paris, and Dick assured him, if he ever
drifted back to America, of food and shelter. So here he is."
"And the poet?" Graham asked, glad that she must still talk for a
while, enabling him to study the quick dazzlement of smile that played
upon her face.
Public-domain text, read in full here on John Shaqi.
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