So was the pale--the palest of green lights--on the top storey which you could see swinging from the roof when the coffee-ice shutters were thrown back as the evening breeze came down the river. It was pale, yet bright like the first star at sunsetting.
And sometimes, but not often, if you watched in the early dusk you might see the owner of the ice-cream house flit across the open window. She was like a sugar-drop herself, rose or saffron decked with silver leaf, a slender scrap of a creature who tinkled as she walked and gave out a perfume of heavy scented flowers. But this was seldom; more often you only heard the tinkle, either of silver or laughter, since Burfâni--for that was her name--was of those who barter the one for the other. It was in truth her hereditary trade, though neither her father nor her mother had practised it; their rôle in life having been that of pater and mater-familias. A very necessary one if the race is to survive, and so in this generation, also, her brother had undertaken the duty of marrying his first cousin. The young couple being now, in the privacy and propriety of the second storey, engaged in bringing up a fine family of girls to succeed to the top storey when Burfâni's age should drive her to a lower place in life. In the meantime, however, she allowed them so much a month; enough to enable idle Zulfkar to fight quail in the bazaars and keep his wife Lâzîzan in the very strictest seclusion--as befitted one filched from the profession of bartering smiles in order to fulfil the first duty of a woman--the rearing of babes.
Thus, in more ways than one, the house was conglomerate. On the side overlooking the broad path there was the stained rose-leaf hall, empty, swept, and garnished, and the dark stair leading up and up to the wandering star of a lamp twinkling out into the sunset amid the sound of laughter and money. On the side giving upon narrow respectability a hall full of household gear and dirt where the little girls played, and a dark stair leading to a darker room where Lâzîzan sat day after day bewailing her sad fate; for, of course, life would have been much gayer over the way, since she was a beautiful woman. Far more beautiful in a lavish, somewhat loud fashion, than the lady belonging to the ice-cream house with her delicate, small face; but that was the very reason why she had been chosen out from many to carry on the race as it ought to be carried on. Burfâni, of course, was clever, and that counted for much, but it never did in their profession to rely on brains above looks. Nevertheless Lâzîzan, when in a bad temper, was in the habit of telling herself that if she had been taught to sing and dance, as the little lady had been taught, she could have made the ice-cream house a more paying concern than it was--to judge by the pittance they received from it! And this angry complaint grew with her years until as she sat suckling her fourth child, she felt sometimes as if she could strangle it, even though it was a boy, and though as a rule she was an affectionate mother. In truth the sheer animal instinct natural to so finely developed a creature lasted out the two or three years during which her children were hers alone; after that, when they began crawling downstairs and playing in the hall where she might never go, she became jealous and then forgot all about them.