"Is your sister--is Miss Travis going to have her breakfast now? Is
she got up yet?" inquired Victorine of Howard and Snooky, as she pushed
the cream pitcher out of Howard's reach. It was significant of Mr.
Bessemer's relations with his family that Victorine did not address her
question to him.

"Yes, yes, she's coming," said both the children, speaking together;
and Howard added: "Here she comes now."

Travis Bessemer came in. Even in San Francisco, where all women are
more or less beautiful, Travis passed for a beautiful girl. She was
young, but tall as most men, and solidly, almost heavily built. Her
shoulders were broad, her chest was deep, her neck round and firm. She
radiated health; there were exuberance and vitality in the very touch
of her foot upon the carpet, and there was that cleanliness about her,
that freshness, that suggested a recent plunge in the surf and a
"constitutional" along the beach. One felt that here was stamina, good
physical force, and fine animal vigor. Her arms were large, her wrists
were large, and her fingers did not taper. Her hair was of a brown so
light as to be almost yellow. In fact, it would be safer to call it
yellow from the start--not golden nor flaxen, but plain, honest yellow.
The skin of her face was clean and white, except where it flushed to a
most charming pink upon her smooth, cool cheeks. Her lips were full
and red, her chin very round and a little salient. Curiously enough,
her eyes were small--small, but of the deepest, deepest brown, and
always twinkling and alight, as though she were just ready to smile or
had just done smiling, one could not say which. And nothing could have
been more delightful than these sloe-brown, glinting little eyes of
hers set off by her white skin and yellow hair.

She impressed one as being a very normal girl: nothing morbid about
her, nothing nervous or false or overwrought. You did not expect to
find her introspective. You felt sure that her mental life was not at
all the result of thoughts and reflections germinating from within, but
rather of impressions and sensations that came to her from without.
There was nothing extraordinary about Travis. She never had her
vagaries, was not moody--depressed one day and exalted the next. She
was just a good, sweet, natural, healthy-minded, healthy-bodied girl,
honest, strong, self-reliant, and good-tempered.

Though she was not yet dressed for church, there was style in her to