I was to
learn later in the day that she's a Macedonian Christian whom the
Chataways harbor against the cruel Turk in return for domestic service;
a romantic item that Eliza named to me in rueful correction of the
absence of several indeed that are apparently prosaic enough.
The powder on the massive lady's face indeed transcended, I rather
thought, the bounds of prose, did much to refer her to the realm of
fantasy, some fairy-land forlorn; an effect the more marked as the
wrapper she appeared hastily to have caught up, and which was somehow
both voluminous and tense (flowing like a cataract in some places, yet
in others exposing, or at least denning, the ample bed of the stream)
reminded me of the big cloth spread in a room when any mess is to be
made. She apologized when I said I had come to inquire for Miss
Talbert--mentioned (with play of a wonderfully fine fat hand) that she
herself was "just being manicured in the parlor"; but was evidently
surprised at my asking about Eliza, which plunged her into the
question--it suffused her extravagant blondness with a troubled light,
struggling there like a sunrise over snow--of whether she had better,
confessing to ignorance, relieve her curiosity or, pretending to
knowledge, baffle mine. But mine of course carried the day, for mine
showed it could wait, while hers couldn't; the final superiority of
women to men being in fact, I think, that we are more PATIENTLY curious.
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