The flush that suffused the girl’s face surprised the watcher and piqued
his curiosity. Fallaray, the ascetic, the married bachelor who lived in
one wing of his house while Lady Feodorowna entertained the resuscitated
Souls in the other,—and this young girl of the lower middle class,
worshiping at his shrine! He would have followed her for the rest of the
afternoon with no other purpose than to study her moods and watch her
stir the passers-by like the whir of an aeroplane or the sudden scent of
lilac. But the arrival of a train swept a crowd between them and he lost
her. He took a ticket to see if she were on one or other of the
platforms, returned to the street and searched up and down. She had
gone. Before he left, another bill was posted upon the board of the
_Evening Standard_. “Fallaray sees Prime Minister. May resign from
cabinet. Uneasiness in Downing Street,” and as he walked away, no longer
interested in the psychology of crowds, but with his imagination all
eager and alight, the playwright in him had grasped at the germ of a
dramatic experiment.—Take the man Fallaray, a true and sensitive
patriot, working for no rewards; humanitarian, scholar, untouched by
romance, deaf to the rustle of silk—and that girl, woman to the tips of
her ears, Eve in every movement of her body——
II
“Lola’s late,” said Mrs. Breezy. “She ought to have been home half an
hour ago.”
Without taking from his eye the magnifying glass through which he was
peering into the entrails of a watch, John Breezy gave a fat man’s
chuckle. “Don’t you worry about Lola. She’s the original good girl and
has more friends among strangers than the pigeons in Kensington Gardens.
She’s all right, old dear.”
But Mrs. Breezy never gave more than one ear to her husband. She was not
satisfied. She left her place behind the glistening counter of the
little jewelry shop in Queen’s Road, Bayswater, and went out into the
street to see if she could see anything of her ewe lamb,—the one child
of her busy and thrifty married life. On a rain-washed board above her
head was painted “John Breezy, Watchmaker and Jeweler, Founded in 1760
by Armand de Brézé.” The name had been Bowdlerized as a concession to
the careless English ear.
Public-domain text, read in full here on John Shaqi.
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