Romance Island | Page 8

its possessor has
trained a large family of children--"I am so glad that you can be with us
to-day. I am Mrs. Manners--forgive me," she besought with perfectly
self-possessed distractedness, "I'm afraid that I've forgotten your
name."
"My name is St. George," he answered as well as he could for virtual
speechlessness.
The other members of the Guild were issuing from the room, and Mrs.
Manners turned. She had a fashion of smiling enchantingly, as if to
compensate her total lack of attention.
"Ladies," she said, "this is Mr. St. George, at last."
Then she went through their names to him, and St. George bowed and
caught at the flying end of the name of the woman nearest him, and
muttered to them all. The one nearest was a Miss Bella Bliss Utter, a
little brown nut of a woman with bead eyes.
"Ah, Mr. St. George," said Miss Utter rapidly, "it has been a wonderful
meeting. I wish you might have been with us. Fortunately for us you
are just in time for our third floor council."
It had been said of St. George that when he was writing on space and
was in need, buildings fell down before him to give him two columns
on the first page; but any architectural manoeuvre could not have
amazed him as did this. And too, though there had been occasions
when silence or an evasion would have meant bread to him, the
temptation to both was never so strong as at that moment. It cost St.
George an effort, which he was afterward glad to remember having
made, to turn to Mrs. Manners, who had that air of appointing
committees and announcing the programme by which we always
recognize a leader, and try to explain.

"I am afraid," St. George said as they reached the stairs, "that you have
mistaken me, Mrs. Manners. I am not--"
"Pray, pray do not mention it," cried Mrs. Manners, shaking her little
lamp-shade of a hat at him, "we make every allowance, and I am sure
that none will be necessary."
"But I am with the Evening Sentinel," St. George persisted, "I am afraid
that--"
"As if one's profession made any difference!" cried Mrs. Manners
warmly. "No, indeed, I perfectly understand. We all understand," she
assured him, going over some papers in one hand and preparing to
mount the stairs. "Indeed, we appreciate it," she murmured, "do we not,
Miss Utter?"
The little brown nut seemed to crack in a capacious smile.
"Indeed, indeed!" she said fervently, accenting her emphasis by
briefly-closed eyes.
"Hymn books. Now, have we hymn books enough?" plaintively broke
in Mrs. Manners. "I declare, those new hymn books don't seem to have
the spirit of the old ones, no matter what any one says," she informed St.
George earnestly as they reached an open door. In the next moment he
stood aside and the Readers' Guild filed past him. He followed them.
This was pleasantly like magic.
They entered a large chamber carpeted and walled in the garish flowers
which many boards of directors suppose will joy the cheerless breast.
There were present a dozen women inmates,--sullen, weary-looking
beings who seemed to have made abject resignation their latest vice.
They turned their lustreless eyes upon the visitors, and a portly woman
in a red waist with a little American flag in a buttonhole issued to them
a nasal command to rise. They got to their feet with a starched noise,
like dead leaves blowing, and St. George eagerly scanned their faces.
There were women of several nationalities, though they all looked
raceless in the ugly uniforms which those same boards of directors

consider de rigueur for the soul that is to be won back to the normal. A
little negress, with a spirit that soared free of boards of directors, had
tried to tie her closely-clipped wool with bits of coloured string; an
Italian woman had a geranium over her ear; and at the end of the last
row of chairs, towering above the others, was a creature of a kind of
challenging, unforgetable beauty whom, with a thrill of certainty, St.
George realized to be her whom he had come to see. So strong was his
conviction that, as he afterward recalled, he even asked no question
concerning her. She looked as manifestly not one of the canaille of
incorrigibles as, in her place, Lucrezia Borgia would have looked.
The woman was powerfully built with astonishing breadth of shoulder
and length of limb, but perfectly proportioned. She was young, hardly
more than twenty, St. George fancied, and of the peculiar litheness
which needs no motion to be manifest. Her clear skin was of wonderful
brown; and her eyes, large and dark, with something of the oriental
watchfulness, were like opaque gems and