of high school girls, over suffrage,
marriage, Bernard Shaw. She thought of the opera, concerts, plays. She
saw Fifth Avenue at night agleam with countless motors, torrents of
tempestuous life--and numberless shop windows, hats and dainty gowns and
shoes. She pictured herself at dinners and balls, men noticing her
everywhere. "As they are doing now," she thought, "this very minute in
this car!" Out of all the pictures rose one of a church wedding. And
then this picture faded, and changed to that of her father's funeral in
the old frame yellow church. She frowned, her brown eyes saddened and
suddenly grew wet with a deep homesick tenderness. But in a few moments
she smiled again; once more her pulse-beat quickened. For Amy was
talking good-humouredly. And Ethel's eyes, now curious, now plainly
thrilled, now quizzical, amused and pleased, kept watching her, and she
asked herself:

"Shall I ever be like that?"

The picture she had of her sister grew each moment more warm and
desirable. Eagerly she explored it by the quick questions she threw
out.

They were coming into the city now, in a dusk rich with twinkling
lights. In the car the passengers were stirring. Amy stood up to be
brushed--sleek and alluring, worldly wise--and the fat man in the chair
behind her opened wide his heavy eyes. Then Ethel stood up--and in the
poise of her figure, slim and lithe with its lovely lines, in her
carriage, in her slender neck, in her dark face with its features clear,
her lips a little parted, and in the look in her brown eyes--there was
something which made glances turn from all down the softly lighted car.
There was even a brief silence. And Ethel drew a sudden breath, as from
close behind her the soft voice of the darky porter drawled:

"Yes'm--yes'm--dis is New York. We's comin' right into de station now."

CHAPTER II

"Well, Ethel my love, we're here at last! . . . It must be after
midnight. I wonder when I'll get to sleep? . . . Not that I care
especially. What a quaint habit sleeping is."

She had formed the habit long ago of holding these inner conversations.
Her father had been a silent man, and often as she faced him at meals
Ethel had talked and talked to herself in quite as animated a way as
though she were saying it all aloud. Now she sat up suddenly in bed and
turned on the light just over her head, and amiably she surveyed her
room. It was a pretty, fresh, little room with flowered curtains, a
blue rug, a l