semi-mendicant, with sad-colored raiment and doleful whine, calling for
a subscription for a new "Centennial History," or the confessed genteel
beggar whose rent would be due to-morrow. But there was nothing in any
way usual in the young person who stood before him. She was a tall and
robust girl of eighteen or nineteen, of a singularly fresh and vigorous
beauty. The artists forbid us to look for physical perfection in real
people, but it would have been hard for the coolest-headed studio-rat
to find any fault in the slender but powerful form of this young woman.
Her color was deficient in delicacy, and her dark hair was too
luxuriant to be amenable to the imperfect discipline to which it had
been accustomed; but the eye of Andrea, sharpened by criticising
Raphael, could hardly have found a line to alter in her. The dress of
that year was scarcely more reticent in its revelations than the first
wet cloth with which a sculptor swathes his kneaded clay; and pretty
women walked in it with almost the same calm consciousness of power
which Phryne displayed before her judges. The girl who now entered
Farnham's library had thrown her shawl over one arm, because the shawl
was neither especially ornamental nor new, and she could not afford to
let it conceal her dress of which she was innocently proud; for it
represented not only her beautiful figure with few reserves, but also
her skill and taste and labor. She had cut the pattern out of an
illustrated newspaper, had fashioned and sewed it with her own hands;
she knew that it fitted her almost as well as her own skin; and
although the material was cheap and rather flimsy, the style was very
nearly the same as that worn the same day on the Boulevard of the
Italians. Her costume was completed by a pair of eyeglasses with steel
rims, which looked odd on her rosy young face.

"I didn't send in my name," she began with a hurried and nervous
utterance, which she was evidently trying to make easy and dashing.