n. Fillmore Street knew that the
flat visored cap which his corporation compelled him to wear covered a
brain into which had penetrated the maggot of the Single Tax. When he
encountered Mr. Shivers or Auermann the talk became coruscating..

Eda Rawle, Janet's solitary friend of these days, must also be mentioned,
though the friendship was merely an episode in Janet's life. Their first
meeting was at Grady's quick-lunch counter in Faber Street, which they
both frequented at one time, and the fact that each had ordered a ham
sandwich, a cup of coffee, and a confection--new to Grady's--known as a
Napoleon had led to conversation.

Eda, of course, was the aggressor; she was irresistibly drawn, she would
not be repulsed. A stenographer in the Wessex National Bank, she boarded
with a Welsh family in Spruce Street; matter-of-fact, plodding,
commonplace, resembling--as Janet thought--a horse, possessing, indeed
many of the noble qualities of that animal, she might have been thought
the last person in the world to discern and appreciate in Janet the
hidden elements of a mysterious fire. In appearance Miss Rawle was of a
type not infrequent in Anglo-Saxon lands, strikingly blonde, with high
malar bones, white eyelashes, and eyes of a metallic blue, cheeks of an
amazing elasticity that worked rather painfully as she talked or smiled,
drawing back inadequate lips, revealing long, white teeth and vivid gums.
It was the craving in her for romance Janet assuaged; Eda's was the love
content to pour out, that demands little. She was capable of immolation.
Janet was by no means ungrateful for the warmth of such affection, though
in moments conscious of a certain perplexity and sadness because she was
able to give such a meagre return for the wealth of its offering.

In other moments, when the world seemed all disorder and chaos,--as Mr.
Shivers described it,--or when she felt within her, like demons, those
inexpressible longings and desires, leaping and straining, pulling her,
almost irresistibly, she knew not whither, Eda shone forth like a light
in the darkness, like the beacon of a refuge and a shelter. Eda had faith
in her, even when Janet had lost faith in herself: she went to Eda in the
same spirit that Marguerite went to church; though she, Janet, more
resembled Faust, being--save in these hours of lowered vitality--of the
forth-faring kind .... Unable to confess the need that drove her, she
arrived in Eda's little bedroom to be