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The Game by Jack London
page 11 of 52 (21%)
funeral to live with the Silversteins in their rooms above the candy
store; and here, sheltered by kindly aliens, she earned her keep and
clothes by waiting on the shop. Being Gentile, she was especially
necessary to the Silversteins, who would not run the business themselves
when the day of their Sabbath came round.

And here, in the uneventful little shop, six maturing years had slipped
by. Her acquaintances were few. She had elected to have no girl chum
for the reason that no satisfactory girl had appeared. Nor did she
choose to walk with the young fellows of the neighbourhood, as was the
custom of girls from their fifteenth year. "That stuck-up doll-face,"
was the way the girls of the neighbourhood described her; and though she
earned their enmity by her beauty and aloofness, she none the less
commanded their respect. "Peaches and cream," she was called by the
young men--though softly and amongst themselves, for they were afraid of
arousing the ire of the other girls, while they stood in awe of
Genevieve, in a dimly religious way, as a something mysteriously
beautiful and unapproachable.

For she was indeed beautiful. Springing from a long line of American
descent, she was one of those wonderful working-class blooms which
occasionally appear, defying all precedent of forebears and environment,
apparently without cause or explanation. She was a beauty in color, the
blood spraying her white skin so deliciously as to earn for her the apt
description, "peaches and cream." She was a beauty in the regularity of
her features; and, if for no other reason, she was a beauty in the mere
delicacy of the lines on which she was moulded. Quiet, low-voiced,
stately, and dignified, she somehow had the knack of dress, and but
befitted her beauty and dignity with anything she put on. Withal, she
was sheerly feminine, tender and soft and clinging, with the smouldering
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