Page:Elizabeth Jordan--Tales of the city room.djvu/140

 picture was the shrine of this honest mountaineer in that innocent home. It had pleased the original to pose, on one occasion, with a demure sweetness on her Madonna-like face. The look had been caught in all its falseness, and told its lie to thousands in the land too ignorant to know it as a pose. Miss Herrick looked up at the big dark eyes that gazed so pensively back at her, and wondered why their baneful influence must be felt here, of all places. She recalled, with an inward shudder, the chain of wrong-doing which the woman had wrought. Disgrace, ruin, death, had been the portions dealt out by her small jewelled hands. The newspapers had teemed with the shame of it, and she had gloried in the advertising. Miss Herrick remembered interviewing her several times and hearing her comment on those tragedies of her own making. The soft lips that showed such a pathetic curve in the picture had set like the mouth of a snake on one of those occasions.

"The fools!" she had cried. "If it had not been I, it would have been some one else who ruined them. These mothers' boys need to be—how do you put it?—whipped into