Jewel Weed

Along the wide straight street of the city surged the usual shopping

crowd. Largely petticoated was it, for o'daytimes man must be busy at

his office that woman may have this privilege of going shopping. Surely

there is no other stream in the wide world that is so monotonous as this

human never-ending current. The same types, the same clothes, the same

subjects of conversation in the fragments that catch the ear. And seldom

does one see a face that looks even cheerful, much less happy,--all

intent on matching ribbons.

"The world is too much with us; late and soon;

Getting and spending we lay waste our powers."

Thus might they cry aloud, if they were condemned to proclaim their

sins, like the long banner of bat-like souls that Dante saw passing in

similar fashion beneath his eye.

And yet, in spite of its monotony, humanity is perennially interesting

to itself. Therefore among the strenuous, the hurrying, and the

anxious-eyed, one girl loitered on dilatory foot from wide window to

wide window.

"Girl" seems an inadequate word to describe Lena Quincy. It may be

applied to any youthful feminine person, and Lena, in spite of her

carefully-groomed shabbiness, was by no means one of the herd. She

affected one like a bit of Tiffany glass, shimmering, iridescent,

ethereal; and no ugliness in her surroundings could take away that

impression.

Every one who looked at her at all looked twice. She had grown so used

to this tribute that it hardly affected her unless it came from one who

merited her interest in return.

Now she was wandering from one to another of the ladies with the waxen

faces, the waxen hands and the wooden hearts, who gazed back unmoved

from behind their plate-glass; though it was not the fixed and amiable

smiles of the lay-figures that caught her attention, but rather the

curious way in which this one's braid was laid on the gown, or the new

device in buttons, there beyond.

Now she turned and studied the human flux in front. She was not

shopping, save in sweet imagination. This was her theater, and she was

fain to make the show last as long as possible. Her absorbent gaze saw

everything. Yet it was selective too, for it passed swiftly over the

chaff of the shabby and fixed itself on the wheat of the properly

gowned. Sometimes she wove romances about her swiftly-disappearing

actors, romances not of heart and soul but of garments, of splendors and

of money; but even such entrancing tissues of her brain vanished like

pricked soap-bubbles when there passed in the body one of those select

few whose skirts proclaimed perfection. Could dreams stand against

reality? Yet the dreams were blissful, though, when they were gone, the

girl was left steeped in the bitterness of envy.

It is said that there is a consolation in being well-dressed that

religion itself can not afford. It is to be remembered that there is

also the pharisaism which always forms a hard shell about every kernel

of religion; and the pharisaism of the correct costume is the most

complacent of all forms of self-righteousness. Lena's lips grew

positively pale as she saw it pass, drawing its rustling petticoats

close to its side. She hungered and thirsted for this form of

righteousness.