I never heard the end of that sentence. I flew home and went straight to my mirror. Sure enough, I fancied I saw a haggard look about the eyes--
My God! This gift of beauty doesn't confer immunity from fatigue, accident, old age. This loveliness must fade and crack and wrinkle, these full organ tones must shrivel to a shrill pipe; and I--I! shall one day be a tottering old woman, bent, gray, hideous!
And all the little disfiguring hurts of life--they frighten me! I never enter a train that I do not think, with a shudder, of derailment and bleeding gashes and white scars; or cross a street without looking about for the waving hoofs of runaway horses that shall beat me down, or for some bicycle rider who might roll me over in a limp heap on the paving stones.
Yesterday I saw a horrid creature; her face blotched with red by acid stain or by a birth mark. Why does she not kill herself? Why didn't she die before I saw her? I shall dream of her for months--of her and Darmstetter, old and wrinkled as I shall be some day, and dead--with that same awful look in my fixed eyes!
Ah, what a Nelly I have come to be! Is it possible that I once rode frisky colts bareback and had no nerves! I mustn't have nerves! They make one old. Mr. Blumenthal said so. But how to avoid them? Oh, I must be careful; so careful! How do women dare to ride bicycles?
And this theatrical Napoleon, part of whose business is the appraisement of beauty--did he suspect that mine was less than perfect? It was perfect a month ago.
He couldn't have meant that, or he was trying to make a better bargain by cheapening the wares I brought--
But I can't go upon the stage. How could I have thought of it? I mustn't subject myself to the late hours, the grease paint, the bad air! Of what use would be a mint of money, if I lost my beauty?
I steadied my nerves with a tiny glass of Curaçoa, and looked again. The face in the mirror was beautiful, beautiful! There is no other like it! And gazing upon radiant Her, I might have recovered myself but for the third untoward event of the day.
Perhaps I ought not to have seen him alone, but it is hard for one who has lived in the free atmosphere of the prairie, and has been a bachelor girl in New York with Kitty Reid to think about caution. Besides, it was such a blessed relief to see his full-moon face rise above the darkness of my troubles! I greeted him with my sweetest smile, and did my very best to make myself agreeable.