ind on
Four-and-a-Half Street. Male clerks--there were no female clerks in
the Government in 1854--to the number of half a dozen, two old bureau
officers, an architect's assistant, Reybold, and certain temporary
visitors made up the table. The landlady was the mistress; the slave
was Joyce.

Joyce Basil was a fine-looking girl, who did not know it--a fact so
astounding as to be fitly related only in fiction. She did not know
it, because she had to work so hard for the boarders and her mother.
Loving her mother with the whole of her affection, she had suffered
all the pains and penalties of love from that repository. She was
to-day upbraided for her want of coquetry and neatness; to-morrow, for
proposing to desert her mother and elope with a person she had never
thought of. The mainstay of the establishment, she was not aware of
her usefulness. Accepting every complaint and outbreak as if she
deserved it, the poor girl lived at the capital a beautiful scullion,
an unsalaried domestic, and daily forwarded the food to the table, led
in the chamberwork, rose from bed unrested and retired with all her
bones aching. But she was of a natural grace that hard work could not
make awkward; work only gave her bodily power, brawn, and form. Though
no more than seventeen years of age, she was a superb woman, her chest
thrown forward, her back like the torso of a _Venus de Milo_, her head
placed on the throat of a Minerva, and the nature of a child moulded
in the form of a matron. Joyce Basil had black hair and eyes--very
long, excessive hair, that in the mornings she tied up with haste so
imperfectly, that once Reybold had seen it drop like a cloud around
her and nearly touch her feet. At that moment, seeing him, she
blushed. He plead, for once, a Congressman's impudence, and without
her objection, wound that great crown of woman's glory around her
head, and, as he did so, the perfection of her form and skin, and the
overrunning health and height of the Virginia girl, struck him so
thoroughly that he said:

"Miss Joyce, I don't wonder that Virginia is the mother of
Presidents."

Between Reybold and Joyce there were already the delicate relations of
a girl who did not know that she was a woman, and a man who knew she
was beautiful and worthy. He was a man vigilant over himself, and the
poverty and menial estate of Joyce Basil were already insuperable
obstacles to marrying her, but still he was attracted by her
insensibility that