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 i