en right, and she
fulfilled entirely the promise of her girlhood, defying the insidious
generosity of time and the vulgar influence of Rufus Blight. Should I
ever know? Should I ever see her?

I must have been looking at the clouds as I asked myself these
questions, for I walked right into an elderly woman, a tall, buxom
woman who carried in her arms a tiny Pomeranian. The force of our
collision made her drop her pet, and for an instant he hung suspended
by the leash and choking. I apologized humbly, bowing; but my
victim--for such she seemed to think herself--the victim of my
premeditated brutality, lifted the frightened dog back to the refuge of
her arms, glared at me, turned, and swept on to a modiste's door. Her
haughtiness angered me. I held the fault as much hers as mine, for the
pavement was not crowded and she seemed to have risen from it just to
obstruct my passage. I looked about me to discover whence she had come
so suddenly, and in a carriage standing at the curb I found an
explanation. I said to myself that if she had emerged from so smart an
equipage I had indeed committed _lese-majeste_, for it was such a
turnout as I had dreamed of in my days of opulent dreaming; it was such
a turnout as a poor poet could have used without offending his sense of
the beauty of simplicity. The high-headed horses with their shining
harness, the smart brougham, so spotless that it was hard to imagine
its wheels ever touching the street, the men in their unobtrusive
livery, spoke of unostentation in its most perfect and most expensive
form. The woman of the Pomeranian, I said to myself, must be surely
some _grande-dame_, a leader in that mysterious circle which I knew
only by its name "society." My view of that circle in those days was
tinged with the cynicism of one who knew nothing of it; and though at
the boarding-house table I was prone to rail at it, secretly I had to
admit that my raillery was born of envy. So now it was with a mind
filled half with awe and half with envy that I turned to look after the
imposing woman with the dog.

For the first time I noticed that she had a companion. First, the
companion was but a slender figure in black, smartly clad. I could see
only her back, and yet as I carried my eye from the dainty boot which
rested on the lowest step to the small gloved hand on the railing, to
the small black hat with its blue wings airily poised, I found myself
making comparisons between this