"Is she here?" Mr. Sachs had murmured.
"Yep," the clerk had negligently replied.
And now Edward Henry beheld the objective of his pilgrimage, her whose
personality, portrait and adventures had been filling the newspapers
of two hemispheres for three weeks past. She was not realistically
like her portraits. She was a little, thin, pale, obviously nervous
woman, of any age from thirty-five to fifty, with fair untidy hair,
and pale grey-blue eyes that showed the dreamer, the idealist and
the harsh fanatic. She looked as though a moderate breeze would have
overthrown her, but she also looked, to the enlightened observer, as
though she would recoil before no cruelty and no suffering in pursuit
of her vision. The blind dreaming force behind her apparent frailty
would strike terror into the heart of any man intelligent enough to
understand it. Edward Henry had an inward shudder. "Great Scott!" he
reflected. "I shouldn't like to be ill and have Isabel for a nurse!"
And his mind at once flew to Nellie, and then to Elsie April. "And
so she's going to marry Wrissell!" he reflected, and could scarcely
believe it.
Then he violently wrenched his mind back to the immediate
objective. He wondered why Isabel Joy should wear a bowler hat and a
mustard-coloured jacket that resembled a sporting man's overcoat; and
why these garments suited her.
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