Page:The Atlantic Monthly, Volume 19.djvu/655

 for the present. As we have to tell, not what Myrtle Hazard ought to have done, and why she should have done it, but what she did do, our task is a simpler one than it would be to lay bare all the springs of her action. Until this period, she had hardly thought of herself as a born beauty. The flatteries she had received from time to time were like the chips and splinters under the green wood, when the chill women pretended to make a fire in the best parlor at The Poplars, which had a way of burning themselves out, hardly warming, much less kindling, the fore-stick and the back-log.

Myrtle had a tinge of what some call superstition, and she began to look upon her strange acquisition as a kind of amulet. Its suggestions betrayed themselves in one of her first movements. Nothing could be soberer than the cut of the dresses which the propriety of the severe household had established as the rule of her costume. But the girl was no sooner out of bed than a passion came over her to see herself in that less jealous arrangement of drapery which the Beauty of the last century had insisted on as presenting her most fittingly to the artist. She rolled up the sleeves of her dress, she turned down its prim collar and neck, and glanced from her glass to the portrait, from the portrait back to the glass. Myrtle was not blind nor dull, though young, and in many things untaught. She did not say in so many words, "I too am a beauty," but she could not help seeing that she had many of the attractions of feature and form which had made the original of the picture before her famous. The same stately carriage of the head, the same full-rounded neck, the same more than hinted outlines of figure, the same finely-shaped arms and hands, and something very like the same features startled her by their identity in the permanent image of the canvas and the fleeting one of the mirror.

The world was hers then,—for she had not read romances and love-letters without finding that beauty governs it in all times and places. Who was this middle-aged minister that had been hanging round her and talking to her about heaven, when there was not a single joy of earth that she had as yet tasted? A man that had been saying all his fine things to Miss Susan Posey, too, had he, before he had bestowed his attentions on her? And to a dozen other girls, too, nobody knows who!

The revulsion was a very sudden one. Such changes of feeling are apt to be sudden in young people whose nerves have been tampered with, and Myrtle was not of a temperament or an age to act with much deliberation where a pique came in to the aid of a resolve. Master Gridley guessed sagaciously what would be the effect of his revelation, when he told her of the particular attentions the minister had paid to pretty Susan Posey and various other young women.

The Rev. Mr. Stoker had parted his hair wonderfully that morning, and made himself as captivating as his professional costume allowed. He had drawn down the shades of his windows so as to let in that subdued light which is merciful to crow's-feet and similar embellishments, and wheeled up his sofa so that two could sit in the table and read from the same book.

At eleven o'clock he was pacing the room with a certain feverish impatience, casting a glance now and then at the mirror as he passed it At last the bell rang, and he himself went to answer it, his heart throbbing with expectation of meeting his lovely visitor.

Myrtle Hazard appeared by an envoy extraordinary, the bearer of sealed despatches. Mistress Kitty Fagan was the young lady's substitute, and she delivered into the hand of the astonished clergyman the following missive:—

",—I shall not come to your study this day. I do not feel that I have any more need of religious counsel at this time, and I am told by a friend that there are others who will be glad to hear you talk on this subject.