t to stretch to protective requirements, and her keen eyes
raised to his held them for a moment. Then she turned to me.

"Maybe he'd like to go to some of the homes we go to and see--"

"No. He doesn't want to see." I caught her hand and slipped it
through my arm. "It's much more comfortable not to see. One can
sleep so much better. Are you going our way?" I turned to Selwyn.
"If you are, we'd better start."

For a full block we said nothing. Selwyn, biting the ends of his
close-cut mustache, walked beside me, hands in his pockets and eyes
straight ahead, and not until Bettina had twice asked him if he knew
where Rowland Street was did he answer her.

"Rowland Street?" He turned abruptly, as if brought back to
something far removed in thought. "What on earth do you know of
Rowland Street?"

"Nothing--I never knew there was a street by that name until last
week when I heard a girl talking to grannie, who said she lived on
it. She did her hands, when she talked, just like the girl with you
did." Bettina twisted hers in imitative movements. "She didn't keep
her hands still a minute."

"Few girls do when they talk. They apparently prefer to use their
hands to their brains." Selwyn's shoulders shrugged impatiently,
then his teeth came together on his lip. Again he stared ahead and,
save for Bettina's chatter, we walked in silence to Scarborough
Square.

There had been few times in my life in which speech was impossible,
but during the quarter of an hour it took us to reach home words
would not come, and numbness possessed my body. A world of
possibilities, a world I did not know, seemed suddenly revealing
itself, and at its dark depths and sinister shadows I was frightened,
and more than frightened. Conflicting and confusing emotions, a
sense of outrage and revolt, were making me first hot and then cold,
and distrust and suspicion and baffling helplessness were enveloping
me beyond resistance. The happy ignorance and unconcern and
indifference of my girlhood, my young womanhood, were vanishing
before cruel and compelling verities, and that which, because of its
ugliness, its offensiveness, its repulsiveness, I had wanted to know
nothing about, I knew I would now be forced to face.

It was true what Mrs. Mundy and Aunt Matilda and Selwyn and even
Kitty, four years younger than myself, had often told me, that in
knowledge of certain phases of life I was unwarrantably lacking.
Subjects that had see