LIFE many another chance explorer from New York, Norman was surprised to discover that, within a few minutes of leaving the railway station, his cab was moving through a not unattractive city. He expected to find the Hallowells in a tenement in some more or less squalid street overhung with railway smoke and bedaubed with railway grime. He was delighted when the driver assured him that there was no mistake, that the comfortable little cottage across the width of the sidewalk and a small front yard was the sought-for destination.
"Wait, please," he said to the cabman. "Or, if you like, you can go to that corner saloon down there. I'll know where to find you." And he gave him half a dollar.
The cabman hesitated between two theories of this conduct--whether it was the generosity it seemed or was a ruse to "side step" payment. He--or his thirst --decided for the decency of human nature; he drove confidingly away. Norman went up the tiny stoop and rang. The sound of a piano, in the room on the ground floor where there was light, abruptly ceased. The door opened and Miss Hallowell stood before him. She was throughout a different person from the girl of the office.
She had changed to a tight-fitting pale-blue linen dress made all in one piece. Norman could now have not an instant's doubt about the genuineness, the bewitching actuality, of her beauty. The wonder was how she could contrive to conceal so much of it for the purposes of business. It was a peculiar kind of beauty--not the radiant kind, but that which shines with a soft glow and gives him who sees it the delightful sense of being its original and sole discoverer. An artistic eye--or an eye that discriminates in and responds to feminine loveliness--would have been captivated, as it searched in vain for flaw.
If Norman anticipated that she would be nervous before the task of receiving in her humbleness so distinguished a visitor, he must have been straightway disappointed. Whether from a natural lack of that sense of social differences which is developed to the most pitiful snobbishness in New York or from her youth and inexperience, she received him as if he had been one of the neighbors dropping in after supper. And it was Norman who was ill at ease. Nothing is more disconcerting to a man accustomed to be received with due respect to his importance than to find himself put upon the common human level and compelled to "make good" all over again from the beginning. He felt--he knew--that he was an humble candidate for her favor--a candidate with the chances perhaps against him.
The tiny parlor had little in it beside the upright piano because there was no space. But the paper, the carpet and curtains, the few pieces of furniture, showed no evidence of bad taste, of painful failure at the effort to "make a front." He was in the home of poor people, but they were obviously people who made a highly satisfactory best of their poverty. And in the midst of it all the girl shone like the one evening star in the mystic opalescence of twilight.
"We weren't sure you were coming," said she. "I'll call father. . . . No, I'll take you back to his workshop.
He's easier to get acquainted with there."
"Won't you play something for me first? Or--perhaps you sing? "
"A very little," she admitted. "Not worth hearing."
"I'm sure I'd like it. I want to get used to my surroundings before I tackle the--the biology."
Without either hesitation or shyness, she seated herself at the piano. "I'll sing the song I've just learned."
And she began. Norman moved to the chair that gave him a view of her in profile. For the next five minutes he was witness to one of those rare, altogether charming visions that linger in the memory in freshness and fragrance until memory itself fades away. She sat very straight at the piano, and the position brought out all the long lines of her figure--the long, round white neck and throat, the long back and bosom, the long arms and legs--a series of lovely curves. It has been scientifically demonstrated that pale blue is pre-eminently the sex color. It certainly was pre-eminently HER color, setting off each and every one of her charms and suggesting the roundness and softness and whiteness her drapery concealed. She was one of those rare beings whose every pose is instinct with grace. And her voice-- It was small, rather high, at times almost shrill. But in every note of its register there sounded a mysterious, melancholy-sweet call to the responding nerves of man.
Before she got halfway through the song Norman was fighting against the same mad impulse that had all but overwhelmed him as he watched her in the afternoon.
And when her last note rose, swelled, slowly faded into silence, it seemed to him that had she kept on for one note more he would have disclosed to her amazed eyes the insanity raging within him.
She turned on the piano stool, her hands dropped listlessly in her lap. "Aren't those words beautiful?" she said in a dreamy voice. She was not looking at him. Evidently she was hardly aware of his presence.
He had not heard a word. He was in no mood for mere words. "I've never liked anything so well," he said. And he lowered his eyes that she might not see what they must be revealing.
She rose. He made a gesture of protest. "Won't you sing another?" he asked.
"Not after that," she said. "It's the best I know.
It has put me out of the mood for the ordinary songs."
"You are a dreamer--aren't you?"
"That's my real life," replied she. "I go through the other part just to get to the dreams."
"What do you dream?"
She laughed carelessly. "Oh, you'd not be interested. It would seem foolish to you."
"You're mistaken there," cried he. "The only thing that ever has interested me in life is dreams--and making them come true."
"But not MY kind of dreams. The only kind I like are the ones that couldn't possibly come true."
"There isn't any dream that can't be made to come true."
She looked at him eagerly. "You think so?"
