Your neck is almost as good as mine, if not quite so solid...."
She had a spot of crimson on her high cheek bones and admitted to the
discerning Aileen that she was the least bit excited. After all, the
keenest brains of San Francisco might be down in that long raftered room
they had glimpsed, and in any case she was about to be judged by a new
standard.
"Oh, don't let that worry you," Aileen began.
A door at the end of the room opened abruptly and a small woman came
forward almost panting. "I just ran up those stairs," she cried. "But I was
bound to be the first. I used to go to school with your mother down on Bush
Street--dear Minnie Morrison!"
She was a woman of fifty or sixty, with a nose like an inflamed button,
eyes that watered freely, and a shabby black hat somewhat on one side.
"But my mother never went to school in San Francisco," said Gora stiffly,
and eyeing this first precipitate member of the intellectual world with
profound disfavor.
"Oh, yes, she did. We were the most intimate friends. To think that dear
Minnie's daughter--"
"Her name was not Minnie Morrison--"
'Oh, yes, it was--"
"Don't mind her so much, Gora dear." Aileen did not trouble to lower her
voice. "She's drunk. Let's go down."
Another woman entered the same door almost as hastily, but she was a
stately and rather handsome woman of forty, who gave the intruder such a
withering look from her serene blue eyes that the unrefined member of the
Seven Arts slunk out and could be heard stumbling down the stairs.
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