ise and bawl out, in the approved manner
of his profession, the name of the next station. 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..