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Divination at once told me she was the popular widow of J.K. Bater, the Biscuit King of Nob Hill, and that she was carrying in her big seal-skin muff a gold hatpin mounted with an emerald butterfly, a silver-backed hair brush, a blue enamelled scent bottle, and a porcelain jar, all of which she had slyly 'nicked, when no one was looking.
Yet we throng in our thousands to watch elderly ladies and gentlemen jumping about after a ball, twisting themselves into strange shapes, rushing, racing, falling over one another; and present them with silver-backed hair-brushes and gold-handled umbrellas as a reward to them for doing so.
She passed into their bedroom and began slowly to undress. To go to bed without knowing where he was, what doing, thinking, seemed already a little odd; and she sat brushing her hair slowly with the silver-backed brushes, staring at her own pale face, whose eyes looked so very large and dark. At last there came to her the feeling: "I can't help it! I don't care!"
The white, well-bunched flock had spread, and streams of jumping sheep fled frantically from an enormous silver-backed bear. As the bear struck right and left, a brute-engine of destruction, Jack sent a bullet into him at long range. Stung, the grizzly whirled, bit at his side, and then reared with a roar of fury. But he did not see Jack. He dropped down and launched his huge bulk for Mescal.
It was a spacious room, with pale high-hung draperies, a scent of flowers, such things as an etching of Greuze, an ivory and ebony crucifix over the bed. Captain Filbert remembered the crucifix afterward with a feeling almost intense, also some silver-backed brushes on the toilet-table.
"I don't," he answered humbly, taking the wind out of her sails. Then objects in the room behind her caught his attention: her dressing-table, with its silver-backed brushes and hand-glass, its dainty feminine litter; her blue dressing-gown flung over a chair; and, tucked away in a corner, her small comfortless bed.
I found him seated cross-legged on a blanket beneath one of the cottonwoods, a silver-backed mirror propped against a tree-butt in his front, while the obsequious darkey was deliberately combing out his long hair and fashioning it anew. The Frenchman glanced up at me with a welcoming smile of rare good-humor.
Bater, I replied, 'you have a pin, a hair brush, a scent bottle and a jar, and I described them each minutely, 'whilst in your house you have on your dressing-table a silver-backed clothes brush, a silver manicure set you kleptomaniad if you prefer to call it so from Deacon's in Sacramento Street; a tortoiseshell manicure set, and an ivory card case you obtained in the same manner from Varter's in Market Street; a set of silver buttons, a glove stretcher, and a mauve pin-cushion you likewise helped yourself to from Selter's in Kearney Street; but I might go on detailing them to you till further orders, for your house is literally crammed with them.
He found he was saving money, and since he was a generous man he did the right thing by the little girl: he gave her some silver-backed brushes for her long hair, and a gold chain, and a reconstructed ruby for her finger. Gee, but it was good to be alive. A year went by, a whole year, and he was not tired of her yet.
'What is it? thought Soames. 'What has he got hold of now? His father was sitting before the dressing-table sideways to the mirror, while Emily slowly passed two silver-backed brushes through and through his hair. She would do this several times a day, for it had on him something of the effect produced on a cat by scratching between its ears. "There you are!" he said. "I've been waiting."
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