He snorted. At one point he would have been swayed by a fairer face; now that was hardly to the point. 'Have they relatives?' he asked it.
'The one in Chicago is recently orphaned, one of those in New York was raised by a guardian who cares nothing for her, and her trust fund has been mismanaged as she will shortly learn. Those that do have families, have been repudiated for their unwomanly ways,' the Salamander told him. 'They are suffragettes, proponents of rights for women, and no longer welcome in their parents' homes.'
Tempting. But relatives and parents had been known to change their minds in the past, and welcome the prodigal back into the familial fold.
'Show me the one in Chicago,' he demanded. She seemed to be the best candidate thus far. The Salamander left the vellum page and returned to its obsidian dish, where it began to spin.
As it rotated, turning faster and faster with each passing second, it became a glowing globe of yellow-white light. A true picture formed in the heart of the globe, in the way that a false picture formed in the heart of a Spiritualist's 'crystal ball.' The latter was generally accomplished through the use of mirrors and other chicanery The former was the result of true Magick.
When he saw the girl at last, he nearly laughed aloud at the Salamander's simplistic notion of beauty. Granted, the girl was clad in the plainest of gowns, of the sort that a respectable housekeeper might wear. He recognized it readily enough, from a Sears, Roebuck and Co. catalog left in his office a few years ago by a menial.
Ladies' Wash Suit, two dollars and twenty five cents. Three years out-of-mode, and worn shabby.
She wore wire-rimmed glasses, and she used no artifice to enhance her features. In all these things, she was utterly unlike the expensive members of the silk-clad demimonde whose pleasures he had once enjoyed. But the soft cheek needed no rouge or rice-powder; the lambent blue eyes were in no way disguised by the thick lenses. That slender figure required no over-corseting to tame it to a fashionable shape, and the warm golden-brown of her hair was due to no touch of chemicals to achieve that mellow hue of sun-ripened wheat.
'She is orphaned?' he asked.
The Salamander danced its agreement. 'Recently,' it told him. 'she is the most qualified of them all, scholastically speaking.'
'And possessed of no-inconvenient-family ties,' he mused, watching the vision as it moved in the Salamander's fire. He frowned a little at that, for her movements were not as graceful as he would have liked, being hesitant and halting. That scarcely mattered, for he was not hiring her for an ability to dance.
From the look of her clothing, she had fallen on hard times-unless, of course, she was a natural ascetic, or was donating all of her resources to the Suffrage Movement. Either was possible; if the latter was an impediment to her accepting employment, the Salamander would have rejected her as a candidate.
'We will apply to her-or rather to her mentor,' he decided, and gave the Salamander the signal to resume its place above the half-written letter. 'I am willing to pay handsomely for the services of any male or female with such qualifications, to compensate for the great distance he or she must travel. The tutor will be installed in my own household, drawing a wage of twenty dollars a week as well as full room and board, and a liberal allowance for travel, entertainment, and books. San Francisco affords many pleasures for those of discriminating taste; this year shall even see the glorious Caruso performing at our Opera.' Clothing he would have supplied to her, having it waiting for her if she consented to come; easier to supply the appropriate garments than to hope the girl had any kind of taste at all. He would not have a frump in his house; any female entering these doors must not disgrace the interior. While his home might not rival Leland Stanford's on the outside, the interior was enough to excite the envy of the richest 'nob' on 'Nob Hill.' There would be no cotton-duck gowns from a mail-order catalog trailing over the fine inlay work of his floors, no coarse dark cottons displayed against his velvets and damask satins.
'I hope you will have a student that can match my requirements,' he concluded without haste. 'Your scholarship is renowned even to the wilds of the west and the golden hills of San Francisco, and I cannot imagine that any pupil of yours would disgrace the master. To that end, I am enclosing a rail ticket for the prospective tutor' it was not a first-class ticket for a parlor car; such might excite suspicion. A ticket for the common carriage would be sufficient, and a journey by rail would be safe enough, even for a woman alone. 'I am looking forward to hearing from you as soon as may be.'
'The usual closing?' the Salamander asked delicately. He nodded, and it finished, burning his name into the vellum with a flourish. It continued to hover above the paper, as the paper itself folded without a hand touching it, and slipped itself and a railway pass into a matching envelope. The Salamander sealed it with a single 'hand' pressed into the wax, then burned the address into the obverse of the envelope.
'Take it to Professor Cathcart's office and leave it there,' he instructed, and the Salamander bowed. 'If she does not take this bait, we will have to devise something else.'
'She would be a fool not to take it,' the Salamander replied, surprising him a little with its retort. 'She has no other place to go.'
'Women are not always logical,' he reminded the creature. 'We were best to assume that the initial attempt will be balked at, and contrive another.'
The Salamander simply shook its head, as if it could not understand the folly of mortals, and it and the sealed
