Page:Minnie Flynn (1925).pdf/14

 Minnie's vanity to create its own illusion. She hated the narrow mirrors of the shop windows which reflected with cruel precision the hard, white faces of vain passersby who stopped, shocked by what they saw, yet held spellbound by their grotesque unreality. At sixteen she had been unafraid of them; at eighteen the white liquid powder looked mottled, the rouge seemed laid on in hard bright spots as if, in a moment of clowning, she had pasted a patch of red tissue paper upon each cheek.

The plate-glass window of Sullivan's saloon was to Minnie like the warming smile of a good-looking man. She saw her figure delicately soft and rounded, the ugly suit pastelled in shadows, her gloveless hands little and white. As she held them above her head to adjust her hat, to smooth out its long green quill, they looked like two lilies on long waving stalks. Minnie loved herself when she looked in this window. There was a caressing tenderness in her own fingers as she hiked up her skirt in the back, smoothed the yellowing collar to her coat, drew a cool powder-puff lightly over her face and touched up her lips with a vermilion lip stick. She spat upon the second and third fingers of her right hand, before patting into place each crescent, bandolined curl. She might have thrown a kiss to her smiling reflection had she not been afraid of leering eyes through the louvered swinging doors. An intense curiosity possessed her to see if this mirror would betray her as those slender shafts set in the frames of shop windows had done. She leaned so close that a faint spot of white powder was left upon the chilled pane.

Minnie Flynn, smiling and posing, uttered a sharp cry when a swaying figure lurched through the swinging doors and fell at her feet. "Oh!" Her voice was pierced with fright. And then, when the man staggered to a sitting posture, and she recognized an old friend, she laughed as shrilly as she had screamed.