an emotion.
A man of polished taste in art and literature, and possessing the means
to gratify it, his luxurious home was filled with treasures he
had himself collected, and further enhanced by the stamp of his
appreciation. His library had not only the elegance of adornment that
his wealth could bring and his taste approve, but a certain refined
negligence of habitual use, and the easy disorder of the artist's
workshop. All this was quickly noted by a young girl who stood on its
threshold at the close of a dull January day.
The card that had been brought to the Senator bore the name of "Carmen
de Haro"; and modestly in the right hand corner, in almost microscopic
script, the further description of herself as "Artist." Perhaps the
picturesqueness of the name, and its historic suggestion caught the
scholar's taste, for when to his request, through his servant, that she
would be kind enough to state her business, she replied as frankly that
her business was personal to himself, he directed that she should be
admitted. Then entrenching himself behind his library table, overlooking
a bastion of books, and a glacis of pamphlets and papers, and throwing
into his forehead and eyes an expression of utter disqualification for
anything but the business before him, he calmly awaited the intruder.
She came, and for an instant stood, hesitatingly, framing herself as
a picture in the door. Mrs. Hopkinson was right,--she had "no style,"
unless an original and half-foreign quaintness could be called so. There
was a desperate attempt visible to combine an American shawl with the
habits of a mantilla, and it was always slipping from one shoulder,
that was so supple and vivacious as to betray the deficiencies of an
education in stays. There was a cluster of black curls around her
low forehead, fitting her so closely as to seem to be a part of the
seal-skin cap she wore.
Once, from the force of habit, she attempted to put her shawl over
her head and talk through the folds gathered under her chin, but an
|