site. Besides all
the unequal movement, there were the stoppings. It was a delicate tangle
to keep from knotting. The nerves of the mouths of horses bore the whole
charge and answered it, as they do every day.

The woman in grey, quite alone, was immediately dependent on no nerves
but her own, which almost made her machine sensitive. But this alertness
was joined to such perfect composure as no flutter of a moment disturbed.
There was the steadiness of sleep, and a vigilance more than that of an
ordinary waking.

At the same time, the woman was doing what nothing in her youth could
well have prepared her for. She must have passed a childhood unlike the
ordinary girl's childhood, if her steadiness or her alertness had ever
been educated, if she had been rebuked for cowardice, for the egoistic
distrust of general rules, or for claims of exceptional chances. Yet
here she was, trusting not only herself but a multitude of other people;
taking her equal risk; giving a watchful confidence to averages--that
last, perhaps, her strangest and greatest success.

No exceptions were hers, no appeals, and no forewarnings. She evidently
had not in her mind a single phrase, familiar to women, made to express
no confidence except in accidents, and to proclaim a prudent foresight of
the less probable event. No woman could ride a bicycle along Oxford
Street with any such baggage as that about her.

The woman in grey had a watchful confidence not only in a multitude of
men but in a multitude of things. And it is very hard for any untrained
human being to practise confidence in things in motion--things full of
force, and, what is worse, of forces. Moreover, there is a supreme
difficulty for a mind accustomed to search timorously for some little
place of insignificant rest on any accessible point of stable
equilibrium; and that is the difficulty of holding itself nimbly secure
in an equilibrium that is unstable. Who can deny that women are
generally used to look about for the little stationary repose just
described? Whether in intellectual or in spiritual things, they do not
often live without it.

She, none the less, fled upon unstable equilibrium, escaped upon it,
depended upon it, trusted it, was 'ware of it, was on guard against it,
as she sped amid her crowd her own unstable equilibrium, her machine's,
that of the judgment, the temper, the skill, the perception, the strength
of men and horses.

She had learnt the diffi