her lap
on to the floor--a piece of carelessness which always provoked the
audience to a lullaby of protest. In front of this lady were two Hindu
students with flowing orange ties; and just beyond her, in black velvet,
was a tall woman with a flat, pallid face, who gnawed alternately her
nails and the extinguished end of a cigarette. Then came a group of girl
students, all very much alike, all full of cocoa and the binomial
theorem; while the rest of the audience was made up of typists, clerks,
civil servants, copper-workers, palmists, nurses, Americans and poets,
all lending their ears to the speaker's words as in the Zoological
Gardens elephants, swaying gently, offer their trunks for buns.
Gradually, however, from this hotchpotch of types, the personality of
the speaker detached itself and was able to impress Jenny's attention.
Gradually, as she grew tired of watching the audience, she began to
watch Miss Ragstead and, after a critical appreciation of her
countenance, to make an attempt to comprehend the intention of the
discourse.

Miss Constance Ragstead was a woman of about forty, possessing much of
the remote and chastened beauty that was evident in Miss Bailey. She,
too, was pale, not unhealthily, but with the impression of having lived
long in a rarefied atmosphere. Virginity has its fires, and Miss
Ragstead was an inheritor of the spirit which animated Saint Theresa and
Mary Magdalene of Pazzi. Her social schemes were crowned with aureoles,
her plans were lapped by tenuous gold flames. She was a mystic of
humanity, one who from the contemplation of mortality in its individual
aspirations, had arrived at the acknowledgment of man as a perfect idea
and was able from his virtues to create her theogony. This woman's
presence implied the purification of ceaseless effort. Activity as
expressed by her was a sacrament. It conveyed the isolated solemnity of
a force that does not depend for its reality on human conceptions or
practical altruism. Her activity was a moral radium never consumed by
the expenditure of its energy; it was dynamic whether it effected little
or much. When she recalled the factory in which for a year she had
worked as a hand, the enterprise was hallowed with the romance of a
saint's pilgrimage. When she spoke of her green garden, where June had
healed the hearts of many young women, she seemed like an eremite in
whose consolation was absolute peace. Her voice was modulated with those
half-tones