. The strange taste of the fruit enhanced her sense
of adventure, she tried to imagine herself among the gatherers in the
grove; she glanced at the young man to perceive that he was tall and well
formed, with remarkably expressive eyes almost the colour of the olives
themselves. It surprised her that she liked him, though he was an Italian
and a foreigner: a certain debonnair dignity in him appealed to her--a
quality lacking in many of her own countrymen.

And she wanted to talk to him about Italy,--only she did not know how to
begin,--when a customer appeared, an Italian woman who conversed with him
in soft, liquid tones that moved her ....

Sometimes on these walks--especially if the day were grey and
sombre--Janet's sense of romance and adventure deepened, became more
poignant, charged with presage. These feelings, vague and unaccountable,
she was utterly unable to confide to Eda, yet the very fear they inspired
was fascinating; a fear and a hope that some day, in all this Babel of
peoples, something would happen! It was as though the conflicting soul of
the city and her own soul were one....

CHAPTER III

Lise was the only member of the Bumpus family who did not find
uncongenial such distractions and companionships as were offered by the
civilization that surrounded them. The Bagatelle she despised; that was
slavery--but slavery out of which she might any day be snatched, like
Leila Hawtrey, by a prince charming who had made a success in life.
Success to Lise meant money. Although what some sentimental sociologists
might call a victim of our civilization, Lise would not have changed it,
since it produced not only Lise herself, but also those fabulous
financiers with yachts and motors and town and country houses she read
about in the supplements of the Sunday newspapers. It contained her
purgatory, which she regarded in good conventional fashion as a mere
temporary place of detention, and likewise the heaven toward which she
strained, the dwelling-place of light. In short, her philosophy was that
of the modern, orthodox American, tinged by a somewhat commercialized
Sunday school tradition of an earlier day, and highly approved by the
censors of the movies. The peculiar kind of abstinence once
euphemistically known as "virtue," particularly if it were combined with
beauty, never failed of its reward. Lise, in this sense, was indeed
virtuous, and her mirror told her she was beautiful. Almost anything
could ha