m," Jane decided. "For, even though she is a strange kind of person,
she's a woman--and if she had loved him she couldn't have helped
watching while he talked with another woman--especially with one of my
appearance and class."

Jane rode slowly away. At the corner--it was a long block--she glanced
toward the scene she had just quitted. Involuntarily she drew rein.
Victor and the boy had come out into the street and were playing
catches. The game did not last long. Dorn let the boy corner him and
seize him, then gave him a great toss into the air, catching him as he
came down and giving him a hug and a kiss. The boy ran shouting
merrily into the yard; Victor disappeared in the entrance to the
offices of the New Day.

That evening, as she pretended to listen to Hull on national politics,
and while dressing the following morning Jane reflected upon her
adventure. She decided that Dorn and the "wild girl" were a low,
ill-mannered pair with whom she had nothing in common, that her
fantastic, impulsive interest in them had been killed, that for the
future she would avoid "all that sort of cattle." She would receive
Selma Gordon politely, of course--would plead headache as an excuse for
not walking, would get rid of her as soon as possible. "No doubt,"
thought Jane, with the familiar, though indignantly denied, complacence
of her class, "as soon as she gets in here she'll want to hang on. She
played it very well, but she must have been crazy with delight at my
noticing her and offering to take her up."

The postman came as Jane was finishing breakfast. He brought a note
from Selma--a hasty pencil scrawl on a sheet of printer's copy paper:

"Dear Miss Hastings: For the present I'm too busy to take my walks.
So, I'll not be there to-morrow. With best regards, S.G."

Such a fury rose up in Jane that the undigested breakfast went wrong
and put her in condition to give such exhibition as chance might tempt
of that ugliness of disposition which appears from time to time in all
of us not of the meek and worm-like class, and which we usually
attribute to any cause under the sun but the vulgar right one. "The
impertinence!" muttered Jane, with a second glance at the note which
conveyed; among other humiliating things, an impression of her own
absolute lack of importance to Selma Gordon. "Serves me right for
lowering myself to such people. If I wanted to try to do anything for
the working class I'd have to keep