poke, making their glances fit and illustrate the things she said.
He had never met any one whose eyes played so constant and prominent a
part in their owner's conversation. Theron had never seen a play; but
he had encountered the portraits of famous queens of the drama several
times in illustrated papers or shop windows, and it occurred to him that
some of the more marked contortions of Sister Soulsby's eyes--notably
a trick she had of rolling them swiftly round and plunging them, so to
speak, into an intent, yearning, one might almost say devouring, gaze
at the speaker--were probably employed by eminent actresses like Ristori
and Fanny Davenport.

The rest of Sister Soulsby was undoubtedly subordinated in interest to
those eyes of hers. Sometimes her face seemed to be reviving temporarily
a comeliness which had been constant in former days; then again it would
look decidedly, organically, plain. It was the worn and loose-skinned
face of a nervous, middle-aged woman, who had had more than her share of
trouble, and drank too much tea. She wore the collar of her dress rather
low; and Theron found himself wondering at this, because, though long
and expansive, her neck certainly showed more cords and cavities than
consorted with his vague ideal of statuesque beauty. Then he wondered at
himself for thinking about it, and abruptly reined up his fancy, only to
find that it was playing with speculations as to whether her yellowish
complexion was due to that tea-drinking or came to her as a legacy of
Southern blood.

He knew that she was born in the South because she said so. From the
same source he learned that her father had been a wealthy planter, who
was ruined by the war, and sank into a premature grave under the weight
of his accumulated losses. The large dark rings around her eyes
grew deeper still in their shadows when she told about this, and her
ordinarily sharp voice took on a mellow cadence, with a soft, drawling
accent, turning U's into O's, and having no R's to speak of. Theron had
imbibed somewhere in early days the conviction that the South was the
land of romance, of cavaliers and gallants and black eyes flashing
behind mantillas and outspread fans, and somehow when Sister Soulsby
used this intonation she suggested all these things.

But almost all her talk was in another key--a brisk, direct, idiomatic
manner of speech, with an intonation hinting at no section in
particular. It was merely that of the city-dw