Another world, a delicious, smooth element--Romance
itself--received her, and of hunger and heat, thirst and the fatigue
of the road, she knew no more than the blessed dead themselves....
A sharp tap at the farther door disturbed her, and instinctively she
called, "Come in!"
A swift, swishing step brushed across the bedroom and a slender,
angry-eyed young woman poised like a gull before her.
"Can I get something to eat here?"
Her voice was at once imperious, irritated, unsure of itself. It
could not be that the owner of this voice, dressed with that
insolent simplicity that need not consider the costly patience of
the work-women, ringed like a dowager with great audacious squares
of ruby and white diamond, booted and hatted as one who wears and
throws away, with a bag of golden mesh on her wrist to pay the
price of any whim--it could not be that she doubted what answer she
should receive. And yet she did--did, and had before this: so much
was evident at first sight. She was a curious gypsyish type, for all
her _Rue de la Paix_ curvings and slim, inevitable folds and pleats;
a full, drooping mouth in a slender dark face, great brown eyes and
heavy waves of black hair. She looked discontented and ready to make
some one suffer for it.
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