in her manner. Life had not taught her
domination--superciliousness of grace, which is the lordly power of some
women. Her longing for consideration was not sufficiently powerful to
move her to demand it. Even now she lacked self-assurance, but there was
that in what she had already experienced which left her a little less
than timid. She wanted pleasure, she wanted position, and yet she was
confused as to what these things might be. Every hour the kaleidoscope
of human affairs threw a new lustre upon something, and therewith it
became for her the desired--the all. Another shift of the box, and some
other had become the beautiful, the perfect.

On her spiritual side, also, she was rich in feeling, as such a nature
well might be. Sorrow in her was aroused by many a spectacle--an
uncritical upwelling of grief for the weak and the helpless. She was
constantly pained by the sight of the white-faced, ragged men who
slopped desperately by her in a sort of wretched mental stupor. The
poorly clad girls who went blowing by her window evenings, hurrying home
from some of the shops of the West Side, she pitied from the depths of
her heart. She would stand and bite her lips as they passed, shaking her
little head and wondering. They had so little, she thought. It was so
sad to be ragged and poor. The hang of faded clothes pained her eyes.

"And they have to work so hard!" was her only comment.

On the street sometimes she would see men working--Irishmen with picks,
coal-heavers with great loads to shovel, Americans busy about some work
which was a mere matter of strength--and they touched her fancy. Toil,
now that she was free of it, seemed even a more desolate thing than when
she was part of it. She saw it through a mist of fancy--a pale, sombre
half-light, which was the essence of poetic feeling. Her old father,
in his flour-dusted miller's suit, sometimes returned to her in memory,
revived by a face in a window. A shoemaker pegging at his last, a
blastman seen through a narrow window in some basement where iron was
being melted, a bench-worker seen high aloft in some window, his coat
off, his sleeves rolled up; these took her back in fancy to the details
of the mill. She felt, though she seldom expressed them, sad thoughts
upon this score. Her sympathies were ever with that under-world of toil
from which she had so recently sprung, and which she best understood.

Though Hurstwood did not know it, he was dealing with one whose