Frontier and pioneer life -- Fiction; Miners -- Fiction; San Francisco (Calif.) -- Fiction; Singers -- Fiction
Win had a commission to execute before he went home, and so passed
up Kearney Street to Post, where, a few doors from the corner, he
entered a photographer’s. He was having a copy made on ivory of an old
daguerreotype of his father, to be given as a present to his mother,
and to-day it was to be finished.
The photographer, a clever and capable man, had started the innovation
of having his studio roughly lined with burlaps, upon which photographs
of local belles and celebrities were fastened with brass-headed nails.
Win, waiting for his appearance, loitered round the room looking at
these, recognizing a friend here, and there a proud beauty who had
endured him as a partner at the cotillion because he was the only son
of Jake Shackleton. Farther on was one of Edna Willers, looking very
lovely and seraphic in her large-eyed innocence.
On a small slip of wall between two windows there was only one picture
fastened, and as his eye fell on this he started. It was Mariposa
Moreau, in the lace dress she had worn at the opera, the face looking
directly and gravely into his. At the moment that his glance, fresh
from other faces, fell on it, the haunting suggestion of familiarity,
of having some intimate connection with or memory of it, possessed him
with sudden, startling force. Of whom did she remind him?
He backed away from it, and, as he did so, was conscious that he knew
exactly the way her lips would open if she had been going to speak, of
the precise manner she had of lifting her chin. Yet he had seen her
only twice in his life that he knew of, and then in the half-dark.
It was not she that was known to him, but some one that she looked
like--some one he knew well, that had some vague, yet close connection
with his life. He felt in an eery way that his mind was gropingly
approaching the solution, had almost seized it, when the photographer’s
voice behind him broke the thread.
“It will be ready in a moment, Mr. Shackleton,” he said. “You’re
looking at that picture. It’s a Miss Moreau, a young lady who, I
believe, is a singer. I put it there by itself, as I was just a little
proud of it.”
“It’s a stunning picture and no mistake,” said Win, arranging his
glasses, “but it must be easy to make a picture of a girl like that.”
“On the contrary, I think it’s hard. Miss Moreau’s handsome, but it’s
a beauty that’s more suitable to a painter than a photographer. It’s
the coloring that’s so remarkable, so rich and yet so refined--that
white skin and dark red hair. That’s why I am proud of the picture. It
suggests the coloring, I think. It seems to me there’s something warm
about that hair.”
Win said vaguely, yes, he guessed there must be, wondering what the
fellow meant about there being something warm about the hair. Further
comment was ended by an attendant coming forward with the picture and
handing it to the photographer.
Public-domain text, read in full here on John Shaqi.
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