When she reached the apartment, Fanny rushed into her arms, and inquired breathlessly if she had taken the house?

“We went down again to look at it, mother, and we like it even better than ever.  It will be so lovely to live next door to Carlie.  We can tango every evening, and Carlie knows a lot of boys who come in to dance because the floor is so good.”

Her cheeks flushed while she talked, and, for the moment, she lost entirely her resemblance to Jane, who was never animated, though she made a perpetual murmurous sound.  Unlike Jane, Fanny was vivacious, pert, and, for her years, extraordinarily sophisticated.  Already she dressed with extreme smartness; already she was thinking of men as of possible lovers; and already she was beginning, in her mother’s phrase, “to manage her life.”  Her trite little face, in its mist of golden hair, which she took hours to arrange, still reminded one of the insipid angel on a Christmas card; but in spite of the engaging innocence of her look, she was prodigiously experienced in the beguiling arts of her sex.  Almost from the cradle she had had “a way” with men; and her “way” was as far superior in finesse to the simple coquetry of Cousin Pussy as the worldliness of Broadway was superior to the worldliness of Hill Street.  From her yellow hair, which she wore very low over her forehead and ears, to her silk stockings of the gray called “London smoke,” which showed coquettishly below her “hobble” skirt, and above the flashing silver buckles on her little pointed shoes of; patent leather, Fanny was as uncompromisingly modern in her appearance as she was in her tastes or her philosophy.  Her mind, which was small and trite like her face, was of a curiously speculative bent, though its speculations were directed mainly toward the by-paths of knowledge which Gabriella, in her busy life, had had neither the time nor the inclination to explore.  For Fanny was frankly interested in vice with the cool and dispassionate interest of the inquiring spectator.  She was perfectly aware of the social evil; and unknown to Gabriella she had investigated, through the ample medium of the theatre and fiction, every dramatic phase of the traffic in white slaves.  Her coolness never deserted her, for she was as temperamental as a fish, and, for all the sunny white and gold of her surface, she had the shallow restlessness of a meadow brook.  At twelve years of age she had devoted herself to music and had planned an operatic career; at fourteen, she had turned to literature, and was writing a novel; and a year later, encouraged by her practical mother, she had plunged into the movement for woman suffrage, and had marched, in a white dress and carrying a purple banner, through an admiring crowd in Fifth Avenue.  To-day, after a variable period, when she had dabbled in kindergarten, wood engraving, the tango, and settlement work, she was studying for the stage, and had fallen in love with a matinée idol.  Gabriella, who had welcomed the wood engraving and the kindergartening and had been sympathetically, though impersonally, aware of the suffrage movement, just as she had been aware many years before of the Spanish War, was deeply disturbed by her daughter’s recent effervescence of emotion.