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There were treasures of rarest old china and delfware, and curious old carved stands for fragile dishes. A wealth of swinging-baskets of flowers and ferns and bright girl-faces lighted up the solemn, shady old room, in which we must not linger, for there is much to see outside.
He was relieved that at first he saw in none of the girl-faces before him anything which resembled in the slightest degree the expression which he had seen in Lucy Ayres's. Some were full of young mischief, chafing impatiently at the fetters of school routine. They were bubbling over with innocent animal life; they were longing to be afield at golf or tennis. They hated their books.
The room was very prettily decorated with blossoming boughs, and Japanese lanterns, and set about with long tables covered with white, which contained the articles for sale. In the center of the room was the flower-booth, and that was lovely. It was a circle of green, with oval openings to frame young girl-faces, and on the circular shelf were heaped flowers in brilliant masses.
Their wings moved in rotation, and with machine-like regularity. First one pair flashed up, swept back and down, then another, and another. As they neared, the color seemed the least wonderful detail of the picture. For it changed in effect from a column of glittering wings to a column of girl-faces, a column that floated light as thistle-down, a column that divided, parted, opened, closed again.
Horace thought, as his eyes met one and another of the girl-faces. "She is not, cannot be, a common type." And then he felt something like a chill of horror as his eyes met those of a new pupil, a girl from Alford, who had only entered the school the day before. She was not well dressed.
"Be careful you don't get hurt," she cried, as we threaded a narrow passage in and out among the stamping, throbbing machinery, where, by the light that filtered through the grimy windows, I got vague, confused glimpses of girl-faces shining like stars out of this dark, fearful chaos of revolving belts and wheels, and above the bedlam noises came girlish laughter and song.
As he passed the prow of a tall pleasure-boat he was caught in a rope of flowers let down from above and looped about him with a dexterous hand. He turned in the pretty fetters and looked up. Above him was a row of a dozen little girl-faces, set like apple-blossoms along the side of the vessel. The youngest was not over twelve years of age, the oldest, fourteen.
But far before him longing girl-faces were waiting behind the windows near the long road. Love, love awaited him from one end of the road to the other. Whether it was the jubilee of his boon-companions, the relieved "At last!" of the inn-keepers, or the smothered sigh of the pretty girls it was all a part of the same joy. And these girls were so modest.
Only some morning, when the children tell them it is Sant' Antonio's Day, an old pain will rise in their hearts, and they will see the dear old arcades of Padua and the little gay booths, and trustful eyes and fresh girl-faces will start up in their memories; and when the church-bells ring out they will hide their heads from the marchesa and the marchesini and cry out aloud for the old happy student-time, when love and hope of glory and high belief in God and man were theirs.
"The little girls are crippled from these weights. The boy babe rides his sister for his first views of the world.... Look at the sweet little girl-faces, haggard from the burden of their fat-cheeked, wet-nosed brothers. A birth is a miss over there a miss for which the mother suffers when it is not a boy. The girls of Japan carry their brothers until they begin to carry their sons.
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