furnished and unadorned; without the adventitious aids of dress or jewels
or the fine manners of society–Harry couldn’t understand it. But she
fascinated him, and held him just beyond the line of absolute familiarity
at the same time. While he was with her she made him forget that the
Hawkins’ house was nothing but a wooden tenement, with four small square
rooms on the ground floor and a half story; it might have been a palace
for aught he knew.
Perhaps Laura was older than Harry. She was, at any rate, at that ripe
age when beauty in woman seems more solid than in the budding period of
girlhood, and she had come to understand her powers perfectly, and to
know exactly how much of the susceptibility and archness of the girl it
was profitable to retain. She saw that many women, with the best
intentions, make a mistake of carrying too much girlishness into
womanhood. Such a woman would have attracted Harry at any time, but only
a woman with a cool brain and exquisite art could have made him lose his
head in this way; for Harry thought himself a man of the world. The
young fellow never dreamed that he was merely being experimented on; he
was to her a man of another society and another culture, different from
that she had any knowledge of except in books, and she was not unwilling
to try on him the fascinations of her mind and person.
For Laura had her dreams. She detested the narrow limits in which her
lot was cast, she hated poverty. Much of her reading had been of modern
works of fiction, written by her own sex, which had revealed to her
something of her own powers and given her indeed, an exaggerated notion
of the influence, the wealth, the position a woman may attain who has
beauty and talent and ambition and a little culture, and is not too
scrupulous in the use of them. She wanted to be rich, she wanted luxury,
she wanted men at her feet, her slaves, and she had not–thanks to some
of the novels she had read–the nicest discrimination between notoriety
and reputation; perhaps she did not know how fatal notoriety usually is
to the bloom of womanhood.
With the other Hawkins children Laura had been brought up in the belief
that they had inherited a fortune in the Tennessee Lands. She did not by
any means share all the delusion of the family; but her brain was not
seldom busy with schemes about it. Washington seemed to her only to
dream of it and to be willing to wait for its riches to fall upon him in
a golden shower; but she was impatient, and wished she were a man to take
hold of the business.
“You men must enjoy your schemes and your activity and liberty to go
about the world,” she said to Harry one day, when he had been talking of
New York and Washington and his incessant engagements.
“Oh, yes,” replied that martyr to business, “it’s all well enough, if you
don’t have too much of it, but it only has one object.”
“What is that?”
“If a woman doesn’t know, it’s useless to tell her. What do you suppose
I am staying in Hawkeye for, week after week, when I ought to be with my
corps?”
“I suppose it’s your business with Col. Sellers about Napoleon, you’ve
always told me so,” answered Laura, with a look intended to contradict
her words.
“And now I tell you that is all arranged, I suppose you’ll tell me I
ought to go?”
“Harry!” exclaimed Laura, touching his arm and letting her pretty hand
rest there a moment. “Why should I want you to go away? The only person
in Hawkeye who understands me.”
“But you refuse to understand me,” replied Harry, flattered but still
petulant. “You are like an iceberg, when we are alone.”
Laura looked up with wonder in her great eyes, and something like a blush
suffusing her face, followed by a look of langour that penetrated Harry’s
heart as if it had been longing.
“Did I ever show any want of confidence in you, Harry?” And she gave him