The impresario turned and faced a tall, quite handsome lady, near his own age, gowned expensively and somewhat complexly. Her eyes were frank, her demeanour that of one who has been much about and feels at home in the combinations of a moving life without sacrificing a rather unusual fund of freshness.
“I beg your pardon,” she said, smiling easily and just a little grandly, “but I wonder if you could tell me how to get to Crawl Hill?”
Mr. Curry’s face lighted humorously. “A moment more and I might have put the same question to you.”
“Oh, I _see_!” she observed, simply and even graciously, much as though they were old friends. “Quite a _coincidence_—isn’t it? I thought I knew _perfectly_ well when I started _out_, but this part of the city has changed so!”
“Lord, hasn’t it! Crawl Hill used to be one of those big places”—he enlarged a little upon the circumstances, adding: “Since we’re both headed for the same auction, we might walk on together, and I’ll ask the way.”
“It’s very kind of you, I’m _sure_!” she told him, her manner more than ever gracious.
So the stroll was thus resumed, and Mr. Curry was struck with the peculiar ease he felt from the very beginning in his new companion’s company. Their talk, as they proceeded, widened gradually to embrace a considerable range of subjects: cheerful commonplaces—just, as a contemporary puts it, “the talk which goes up the chimney with the spark of the wood fire.” Discreet, polite side-glances revealed, for him, an undoubtedly romantic lady nearly as tall as himself, vaguely lavish, just faintly overpowering in her enthusiasms, who walked along with free, hopeful stride and lifted her arching brows in an unbroken expression of communicative pleasantness. She wore a cloak made from an Arabian gondura—a fabric of rusty plum with intricate embellishment of bright green braid. There were wide flowing sleeves; and underneath the cloak one now and then caught sight of confusing details; a bit of Paisley, blue serge, large decorated brass buttons. Her hat was an oddly shaped straw with an ample feather falling off behind.
The lady, for her part, quickly noted his air of bustling optimism and seemed responding to it with unconscious warmth; at first, it is true, she had eyed his rings and general air of the exotic with some slight twinges of doubt: but after she had received one or two of his radiant smiles it was only too plain she felt it would be unhandsome to hold so small a matter against him. Indeed, he seemed to perceive in her at once an element of happy tolerance, at the same time that he was very sure he caught a genuine passion for the artistic. Above all he couldn’t but be impressed with the uplifting and flowing quality in her rich voice. “I learned about the auction from some _friends_ who have been spending months in Morocco, where they _heard_ about Mr. Hoadley’s death and immediately thought about the lovely ‘things’ every one remembers having seen in his house here in San Fran_cisco_!” Her sentences, inclined to be “Germanic,” moved with the liquid fluency of a wide, well-mannered river. And there were words she stressed saliently or perhaps rather lingered over; it was a little quaint. One came to listen for them. Other words, too, which, by the most marvellous yet wholly artless subtlety in shading, she managed to slip within quotation marks—although, as a matter of fact, there was seldom any real reason for their being quoted. “I don’t expect to find a _thing_ that I’ll really _buy_, for everything’s sure to be quite _dear_, you know, considering how immensely rich Mr. Hoadley was when he did his _collecting_, although it’s always pleasant to just visit these ‘sales’ and look around and perhaps pick up some little trifles that catch one’s _fancy_—as trifles have such an irresistible way of _doing_!”