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A Gold Slipper
by
He spoke devoutly, and Kitty watched him through half-closed eyes. “And you like to feel that there are light-minded girls like me, who only care about the inside of shops and theatres and hotels, eh? You amuse me, you and your fish! But I mustn’t keep you any longer. Haven’t I given you every opportunity to state your case against me? I thought you would have more to say for yourself. Do you know, I believe it’s not a case you have at all, but a grudge. I believe you are envious; that you’d like to be a tenor, and a perfect lady-killer!” She rose, smiling, and paused with her hand on the door of her stateroom. “Anyhow, thank you for a pleasant evening. And, by the way, dream of me tonight, and not of either of those ladies who sat beside you. It does not matter much whom we live with in this world, but it matters a great deal whom we dream of.” She noticed his bricky flush. “You are very naive, after all, but, oh, so cautious! You are naturally afraid of everything new, just as I naturally want to try everything: new people, new religions–new miseries, even. If only there were more new things–If only you were really new! I might learn something. I’m like the Queen of Sheba–I’m not above learning. But you, my friend, would be afraid to try a new shaving soap. It isn’t gravitation that holds the world in place; it’s the lazy, obese cowardice of the people on it. All the same”–taking his hand and smiling encouragingly–“I’m going to haunt you a little. Adios!”
When Kitty entered her state-room, Celine, in her dressing-gown, was nodding by the window.
“Mademoiselle found the fat gentleman interesting?” she asked. “It is nearly one.”
“Negatively interesting. His kind always say the same thing. If I could find one really intelligent man who held his views, I should adopt them.”
“Monsieur did not look like an original,” murmured Celine, as she began to take down her lady’s hair.
* * * * *
McKann slept heavily, as usual, and the porter had to shake him in the morning. He sat up in his berth, and, after composing his hair with his fingers, began to hunt about for his clothes. As he put up the window-blind some bright object in the little hammock over his bed caught the sunlight and glittered. He stared and picked up a delicately turned gold slipper.
“Minx! hussy!” he ejaculated. “All that tall talk–! Probably got it from some man who hangs about; learned it off like a parrot. Did she poke this in here herself last night, or did she send that sneak-faced Frenchwoman? I like her nerve!” He wondered whether he might have been breathing audibly when the intruder thrust her head between his curtains. He was conscious that he did not look a Prince Charming in his sleep. He dressed as fast as he could, and, when he was ready to go to the wash-room, glared at the slipper. If the porter should start to make up his berth in his absence–He caught the slipper, wrapped it in his pajama jacket, and thrust it into his bag. He escaped from the train without seeing his tormentor again.
Later McKann threw the slipper into the waste-basket in his room at the Knickerbocker, but the chambermaid, seeing that it was new and mateless, thought there must be a mistake, and placed it in his clothes-closet. He found it there when he returned from the theatre that evening. Considerably mellowed by food and drink and cheerful company, he took the slipper in his hand and decided to keep it as a reminder that absurd things could happen to people of the most clocklike deportment. When he got back to Pittsburgh, he stuck it in a lock-box in his vault, safe from prying clerks.
* * * * *
McKann has been ill for five years now, poor fellow! He still goes to the office, because it is the only place that interests him, but his partners do most of the work, and his clerks find him sadly changed–“morbid,” they call his state of mind. He has had the pine-trees in his yard cut down because they remind him of cemeteries. On Sundays or holidays, when the office is empty, and he takes his will or his insurance-policies out of his lock-box, he often puts the tarnished gold slipper on his desk and looks at it. Somehow it suggests life to his tired mind, as his pine-trees suggested death–life and youth. When he drops over some day, his executors will be puzzled by the slipper.
As for Kitty Ayrshire, she has played so many jokes, practical and impractical, since then, that she has long ago forgotten the night when she threw away a slipper to be a thorn in the side of a just man.