The other girls soon became aware of Nancy's ambition. «Here comes your millionaire, Nancy,» they would call to her whenever any man who looked the rôle approached her counter. It got to be a habit of men, who were hanging about while their women folk were shopping, to stroll over to the handkerchief counter and dawdle over the cambric squares. Nancy's imitation highbred air and genuine dainty beauty was what attracted. Many men thus came to display their graces before her. Some of them may have been millionaires; others were certainly no more than their sedulous apes. Nancy learned to discriminate. There was a window at the end of the handkerchief counter; and she could see the rows of vehicles waiting for the shoppers in the street below. She looked and perceived that automobiles differ as well as do their owners.
Once a fascinating gentleman bought four dozen handkerchiefs, and wooed her across the counter with a King Cophetua air. When he had gone one of the girls said:
«What's wrong, Nance, that you didn't warm up to that fellow. He looks the swell article, all right, to me.»
«Him?» said Nancy, with her coolest, sweetest, most impersonal, Van Alstyne Fisher smile; «not for mine. I saw him drive up outside. A 12 H. P. machine and an Irish chauffeur! And you saw what kind of handkerchiefs he boughtsilk! And he's got dactylis on him. Give me the real thing or nothing, if you please.»
Two of the most «refined» women in the storea forelady and a cashierhad a few «swell gentlemen friends» with whom they now and then dined. Once they included Nancy in an invitation. The dinner took place in a spectacular café whose tables are engaged for New Year's eve a year in advance. There were two «gentlemen friends» one without any hair on his headhigh living ungrew it; and we can prove itthe other a young man whose worth and sophistication he impressed upon you in two convincing wayshe swore that all the wine was corked; and he wore diamond cuff buttons. This young man perceived irresistible excellencies in Nancy. His taste ran to shopgirls; and here was one that added the voice and manners of his high social world to the franker charms of her own caste. So, on the following day, he appeared in the store and made her a serious proposal of marriage over a box of hemstitched, grassbleached Irish linens. Nancy declined. A brown pompadour ten feet away had been using her eyes and ears. When the rejected suitor had gone she heaped carboys of upbraidings and horror upon Nancy's head.
«What a terrible little fool you are! That fellow's a millionairehe's a nephew of old Van Skittles himself. And he was talking on the level, too. Have you gone crazy, Nance?»
«Have I?» said Nancy. «I didn't take him, did I? He isn't a millionaire so hard that you could notice it, anyhow. His family only allows him $20,000 a year to spend. The baldheaded fellow was guying him about it the other night at supper.»
The brown pompadour came nearer and narrowed her eyes.
«Say, what do you want?» she inquired, in a voice hoarse for lack of chewinggum. «Ain't that enough for you? Do you want to be a Mormon, and marry Rockefeller and Gladstone Dowie and the King of Spain and the whole bunch? Ain't $20,000 a year good enough for you?»
Nancy flushed a little under the level gaze of the black, shallow eyes.
«It wasn't altogether the money, Carrie,» she explained. «His friend caught him in a rank lie the other night at dinner. It was about some girl he said he hadn't been to the theater with. Well, I can't stand a liar. Put everything togetherI don't like him; and that settles it. When I sell out it's not going to be on any bargain day. I've got to have something that sits up in a chair like a man, anyhow. Yes, I'm looking out for a catch; but it's got to be able to do something more
but inelegant apparel of DanDan the constant, the immutable, the undeviating.
As for Nancy, her case was one of tens of thousands. Silk and jewels and laces and ornaments and the perfume and music of the fine world of goodbreeding and tastethese were made for woman; they are her equitable portion. Let her keep near them if they are a part of life to her, and if she will. She is no traitor to herself, as Esau was; for she keeps he birthright and the pottage she earns is often very scant.
In this atmosphere Nancy belonged; and she throve in it and ate her frugal meals and schemed over her cheap dresses with a determined and contented mind. She already knew woman; and she was studying man, the animal, both as to his habits and eligibility. Some day she would bring down the game that she wanted; but she promised herself it would be what seemed to her the biggest and the best, and nothing smaller.
Thus she kept her lamp trimmed and burning to receive the bridegroom when he should come.
But, another lesson she learned, perhaps unconsciously. Her standard of values began to shift and change. Sometimes the dollarmark grew blurred in her mind's eye, and shaped itself into letters that spelled such words as «truth» and «honor» and now and then just «kindness.» Let us make a likeness of one who hunts the moose or elk in some mighty wood. He sees a little dell, mossy and embowered, where a rill trickles, babbling to him of rest and comfort. At these times the spear of Nimrod himself grows blunt.