We jogged into Pine Cone at eleven, and I occupied myself variously till the hour of the appointment, when, with a sickish feeling of nervous suspense, I forced my steps towards the drug-store. I went in through the fly-screen door, and passed the soda-water fountain and the counters where stale candy and coarse calicoes beckoned for a purchaser, and I went on between green rep, tasseled portières to the damp, dark, inner room where the marble-topped tables, vacant of food, seemed to attract, by some mysterious promise, a swarm of dull and sluggish flies whose mournful buzzing filled the stagnant air.
There was one person in the ice-cream parlor--a man. I moved doubtfully towards him, and he lifted his head. This head was a replica of the pre-Raphaelite figures of Christ, a long, oval, high-browed countenance, with smooth, long, yellow hair parted in the middle of the brow, with oblong eyes, a long nose, a mouth drooping exaggeratedly at the corners, and a very long, silky, yellow beard, also parted in the middle and hanging in two rippling points almost to his waist. He was dressed in a rusty black suit, the very long sleeves of which hung down quite over his hands.
At sight of me he turned pale, rose, the dolorous mouth drooping more extremely. “Madame,” he said in the lisping, clumsy speech of those whose supply of teeth falls short of lingual demands, “is as prompt as the justice of Heaven.” And he bowed and cringed painfully.
I sat down opposite to him, and gave the languid, pimply-faced youth who came an order for two plates of ice-cream. I was horribly embarrassed and confused, but by a mighty effort I maintained an air of self-possession. The priest--I should have known him for a renegade priest anywhere--sat meekly with his hidden hands resting on the table before him, and his great, smooth lids pulled down over his eyes. Once he looked up for an instant.
“Madame preserves her youth,” he lisped, “as though she had lived upon the blood of babes.” And he ran the tip of his tongue over his lips.
This horrible speech was, no doubt, exactly suited to the taste of my counterpart. I knew that I was expected to laugh, and I dragged my lips across my teeth in imitation of the ghastly smile. It passed muster.