Page:Harvey O'Higgins--Don-a-dreams.djvu/249

 He learned from Walter Pittsey that she was on the stage. "She used to be in comic opera, I think," he said, "probably in the chorus. She's aiming at the legitimate now, but I imagine she's not doing much. No temperament. She makes a good show-girl, I suppose. She ought to be singing in a church choir."

But it was not her lack of temperament that struck Don in the meetings that followed; it was a strange effect she gave him of being concealed in her own body—hidden behind her beauty that attracted an admiration which did not reach her real self—silent, or speaking as if from a distance of thought. She was younger than Miss Arden, who was a woman of thirty-five, at least, and already puffy under the eyes and hollow in the cheeks where she might have been, at some time, dimpled. And yet Miss Arden seemed younger in heart, chattered more spiritedly and laughed with less reserve. When they made an excursion in the street-car to Fort George, on a Sunday afternoon, she was gaily juvenile beside Miss Morris's staid sobriety; and, with Walter Pittsey, she made the life of the party, while Don and Miss Morris listened, watched and smiled.

They rode between the monotonous fronts of cheap apartment houses, that were rusty with the iron balconies of fire escapes and overflowing with tenants who hung out the windows panting, or crowded, for air, to the doors. They rode, behind the motorman's insistent gong, through the games of the street-children, and were deafened by competitive shrieks. They came to the hills of the suburbs, covered with patient cemeteries, orphan asylums, homes for the