princes
and emperors brought into such startling proximity one could easily
imagine one's self exchanging the time of day! Incredible to Janet how
the audiences, how even Eda accepted with American complacency what were
to her never-ending miracles; the yearning to see more, to know more,
became acute, like a pain, but even as she sought to devour these scenes,
to drink in every detail, with tantalizing swiftness they were whisked
away. They were peepholes in the walls of her prison; and at night she
often charmed herself to sleep with remembered visions of wide, empty,
treeshaded terraces reserved for kings.

But Eda, however complacent her interest in the scenes themselves, was
thrilled to the marrow by their effect on Janet, who was her medium.
Emerging from the vestibule of the theatre, Janet seemed not to see the
slushy street, her eyes shone with a silver light like that of a mountain
lake in a stormy sunset. And they walked in silence until Janet would
exclaim:

"Oh Eda, wouldn't you love to travel!"

Thus Eda Rawle was brought in contact with values she herself was
powerless to detect, and which did not become values until they had
passed through Janet. One "educative" reel they had seen had begun with
scenes in a lumber camp high in the mountains of Galicia, where grow
forests of the priceless pine that becomes, after years of drying and
seasoning, the sounding board of the Stradivarius and the harp. Even then
it must respond to a Player. Eda, though failing to apply this poetic
parallel, when alone in her little room in the Welsh boarding-house often
indulged in an ecstasy of speculation as to that man, hidden in the mists
of the future, whose destiny it would be to awaken her friend. Hampton
did not contain him,--of this she was sure; and in her efforts to
visualize him she had recourse to the movies, seeking him amongst that
brilliant company of personages who stood so haughtily or walked so
indifferently across the ephemeral brightness of the screen.

By virtue of these marvels of the movies: Hampton ugly and sordid
Hampton!--actually began for Janet to take on a romantic tinge. Were not
the strange peoples of the earth flocking to Hampton? She saw them
arriving at the station, straight from Ellis Island, bewildered, ticketed
like dumb animals, the women draped in the soft, exotic colours many of
them were presently to exchange for the cheap and gaudy apparel of Faber
Street. She sought to summon up in