Leading families replaced by other families, classes
replaced by other classes, nations replaced by other nations--such was
the inevitable social process--so read the records of the fifty or
sixty centuries since history began to be written. Oh, he was trying
to say a lot in this portrait of a girl of ordinary birth--even less
than ordinary--in her cheap shirt-waist and skirt!
And it pleased the sardonic element in Hunt's unmoral nature that this
Maggie, through whom he was trying to symbolize so much, he knew to be
a petty larcenist: shoplifting and matters of similar consequence. She
had been cynically frank about this to him; casual, almost boastful.
Her possessing a bent toward such activities was hardly to be wondered
at, with her having Old Jimmie as her father, and the Duchess as a
landlady, and having for acquaintances such gentlemen as Barney Palmer
and this returning prison-bird, Larry Brainard.
But petty crime, thought Hunt, would not be Maggie's forte if she
developed her possibilities. With her looks, her boldness, her
cleverness, she had the makings of a magnificent adventuress. As he
painted, he wondered what she was going to do, and become; and he
watched her not only with a painter's eye intent upon the present, but
with keen speculation upon the future.
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