Questionable Shapes | Page 5

almost spiritually slender. In common with all of us, he had
heard that shape of girl called willowy, but he made up his mind that
sweetbriery would be the word for Miss Hernshaw, in whose face a
virginal youth suggested the tender innocence and surprise of the
flower, while the droop of her figure, at once delicate and self-reliant,
arrested the fancy with a sense of the pendulous thorny spray. She
looked not above sixteen in age, but as she was obviously out, in the
society sense of the word, this must have been a moral effect; and
Hewson was casting about in his mind for some appropriate form of
thought and language to make talk in when she abruptly addressed him.
"I don't see," she said, with her face still away, "why people make fun
of those poor girls who have to work in that sort of public way."
Hewson silently picked his steps back through the intervening events to
the drolling at breakfast, and with some misgiving took his stand in the
declaration, "You mean the waitress at the inn?"
"Yes!" cried the girl, with a gentle indignation, which was so dear to
the young man that he would have given anything to believe that it
veiled a measure of sympathy for himself as well as for the waitress.
"We went in there last night when we arrived, for some pins--Mrs.
Rock had had her dress stepped on, getting out of the car--and that girl

brought them. I never saw such a sad face. And she was very nice; she
had no more manners than a cow."
Miss Hernshaw added the last sentence as if it followed, and in his poor
masculine pride of sequence Hewson wanted to ask if that were why
she was so nice; but he obeyed a better instinct in saying, "Yes, there's
a whole tragedy in it. I wonder if it's potential or actual." He somehow
felt safe in being so metaphysical.
"Does it make any difference?" Miss Hernshaw demanded, whirling
her face round, and fixing him with eyes of beautiful fierceness.
"Tragedy is tragedy, whether you have lived it or not, isn't it? And
sometimes it's all the more tragical if you have it still to live: you've got
it before you! I don't see how any one can look at that girl's face and
laugh at her. I should never forgive any one who did."
"Then I'm glad I didn't do any of the laughing," said Hewson, willing to
relieve himself from the strain of this high mood, and yet anxious not to
fall too far below it. "Perhaps I should, though, if I hadn't been the
victim of it in some degree."
"It was the vulgarest thing I ever heard!" said the girl.
Hewson looked at her, but she had averted her face again. He had a
longing to tell her of his apparition which quelled every other interest
in him, and, as it were, blurred his whole consciousness. She would
understand, with her childlike truth, and with her unconventionality she
would not find it strange that he should speak to her of such a thing for
no apparent reason or no immediate cause. He walked silent at her side,
revolving his longing in his thought, and hating the circumstance which
forbade him to speak at once. He did not know how long he was lost in
this, when he was suddenly recalled to fearful question of the fact by
her saying, with another flash of her face toward him, "You have lost
sleep Mr. Hewson!" and she whipped forward, and joined the other
women, who were following the lead of St. John and the widow.
Mrs. Rock, to whom Hewson had been presented at the same time as to
Miss Hernshaw, looked vaguely back at him over her shoulder, but
made no attempt to include him in her group, and he thought, for no
reason, that she was kept from doing so on account of Miss Hernshaw.
He thought he could be no more mistaken in this than in the resentment
of Miss Hernshaw, which he was aware of meriting, however
unintentionally. Later, after lunch, he made sure of this fact when Mrs.

Rock got him into a corner, and cozily began, "I always feel like
explaining Rosalie a little," and then her vague, friendly eye wandered
toward Miss Hernshaw across the room, and stopped, as if waiting for
the girl to look away. But Miss Hernshaw did not look away, and that
afternoon, Hewson's week being up, he left St. Johnswort before
dinner.

IV.
The time came, before the following winter, when Hewson was
tempted beyond his strength, and told the story of his apparition. He
told it more than once, and kept himself with increasing difficulty from
lying