The Ely miner. [volume] (Ely, Minn.) 1895-1986, 1925-07-10
Richard Washburn Child
Copyright by e. p. Dutton & Coz
CIV. N. u. Service)

You are my speculation now!" he
would claim. II have bought future
in you!"
Brena would stare back at him, her
great dark eyes questioning and full
of doubt
You think 1 have done badly? No.
1t was my one great inspiration. You
have the body and the health of one
among thousands. You are so beauti-
full with the beauty of eternal things
that even who will not touch your
cheek can feel the same thrill of pleas
ure that one may feel gazing upon a
PraXiteles."
She had said, "Not Phidias, then?"
Yes, Phidias-a work of Phidias.
Because there is not only your carved
limbs and neck and hands but some
thing sublime as well. Beneath your
warm and velvety surface like the tex
! ture of flower petals there is wonder
full mind, and spirit which has come
down through eternities with immortal
life"
You are an eloquent man," the
young girl had said, with a quirk upon
her lips suggestive of her mother.
Your tongue is as silvery as those of
my Irish ancestors"
do you think l shall regret that
have played part in your growth?"
he had asked, with one of his short
laughs. II shall not be more to you
than l am now. How can / use you,
Ell? How could / use my money?
deluded myself once. i thought /
wanted it for myself. But your l do
not want you for myself / only want
your capacity as woman to be filled
to the brim ~
He lived two lives; not at the same
time, but alternately. The one was in
her; the other in himself. When he
could put his own life into hers he for
got his own. He became that being
whose warmth and light she had seen
beneath the cold steel shell of an un-
RENTING fighter and plunger, whose
singleness of purpose and will had
found dynamic concentration in his
spare body and had expressed them
selves in mask of cruelty and craft
upon a face otherwise esthetic and
sensitive. AT these times his counte-
nance wore that abnormal youth of
feature which was his most marked
personal characteristic 1t was only
upon rare occasions that it was twist
ed up as if in cramp of anxiety; as
if some distant but menacing forecast
had pointed finger at him from affair."
For moment he forgot her; for a
moment he had been immersed in his
self.
For more than half year, in Buda-
pest, in Petrograd, in London, this one
of the two lives of Compton Parmalee
was dominant. Something of the youth
and the calm of Brena's eyes, looking
doors to her expectant inquiry, was re-
fiected in his own.
By manipulation of acquaintance
and, when necessary, by lavish expen-
diture, he procured her entry into rare
social circumference. In that first
year Brena, considered by all strangers
to be several years older than she, N
fact, was, and of whom no one would
have believed it if it had been told
them that she had been plucked out of
that kitchen garden of Wilkes board
ing house, the Porto Rican shop, the
movies, and sordid sickly-brown pro-
vincialism. had dined with foreign am
bassadors, hunted with Lady Tremayn
Nash, been courted over, through and
under her disgust, by a cousin Of the
ex-king of the Portuguese, occupied a
villa In the Italian lakes and voyaged
In luxurious yacht around the Baltic
in midsummer with the family of
Stockholm's largest banker. With the
| credit of admiration that her natural
poise, her beauty, her talent as a lin
guist, her mothers wit and her fathers
love of learning had brought her every
slightest degree.
When Parmalee, in Berlin, said to
her forgivably exulting, "Thus we work
our miracle! In November you were
| taking your laundry to the Chinaman's
in Harvey street; in March you wear
thirty thousand dollars worth of en-
eralds to contrast with that crown of
red-gold hair at ball in the Chateau
de Pontemori," she said:
1.-The leap is no great one There Is
hairs breadth of difference between
the frauds of this world and the pre-
nf a IN,
the same Brena."
But growing!" said he, as a horti-
culturist would speak,
"Yes, growing" said Brena with a
sigh.
Other men, sensing subconsciously
her ungiven and unused affections,
brought all their sophistication 10 their
aid in making love to her. She COM
bined the classic beauty Of the Greek
goddess with the Elusive shimmering
charm of her Irish blood; dozens of
| men in various capitals noting 1t, as
Peter DeWolfe marked it down later,
gave amusement to the Dallas broker
| and annoyance to her. She said that
she might have been thrilled by these
| idolatries were it not for the fact that
| they always came either from these
whose attentions TO women were quite
general and successive or from those
whose imagination could conceive only
very plain driveway from the thor
oughfare of formal society to the Sc
questered dwelling place of woman's
heart.
You are rather tired" Parmalee
said to her once.