Page:What Maisie Knew (Chicago & New York, Herbert S. Stone & Co., 1897).djvu/22

usual places, rather vulgar to wonder at her. Strangers only did that; but they, to the amusement of the familiar, did it very much; it was an inevitable way of betraying an alien habit. Like her husband, she carried clothes, carried them as a train carries passengers. People had been known to compare their taste and dispute about the accommodation they gave these articles, though inclining on the whole to the commendation of Ida as less overcrowded, especially with jewelry and flowers. Beale Farange had natural decorations, a kind of costume in his vast fair beard, burnished like a gold breastplate, and in the eternal glitter of the teeth that his long mustache had been trained not to hide and that gave him, in every possible situation, the look of the joy of life. He had been destined in his youth to diplomacy and momentarily attached, without a salary, to a legation which enabled him often to say "In my time, in the East; " but contemporary history had somehow had no use for him, had hurried past him and left him in perpetual Piccadilly. Every one knew what he had—only twenty-five hundred. Poor Ida, who had run through everything, had now nothing but her car-