unattractive frame house, such as carpenters build in America, scantily

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

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The Gilded Age