poor pinched mother and tormented father and
lost brother and starved sister, together for a lifetime. During her
first weeks she had often gasped at the sums people were willing to pay
for the stuff they transmitted--the "much love"s, the "awful" regrets,
the compliments and wonderments and vain vague gestures that cost the
price of a new pair of boots. She had had a way then of glancing at the
people's faces, but she had early learnt that if you became a
telegraphist you soon ceased to be astonished. Her eye for types
amounted nevertheless to genius, and there were those she liked and those
she hated, her feeling for the latter of which grew to a positive
possession, an instinct of observation and detection. There were the
brazen women, as she called them, of the higher and the lower fashion,
whose squanderings and graspings, whose struggles and secrets and love-
affairs and lies, she tracked and stored up against them till she had at
moments, in private, a triumphant vicious feeling of mastery and ease, a
sense of carrying their silly guilty secrets in her pocket, her small
retentive brain, and thereby knowing so much more about them than they
suspected or would care to think. There were those she would have liked
to betray, to trip up, to bring down with words altered and fatal; and
all through a personal hostility provoked by the lightest signs, by their
accidents of tone and manner, by the particular kind of relation she
always happened instantly to feel.

There were impulses of various kinds, alternately soft and severe, to
which she was constitutionally accessible and which were determined by
the smallest accidents. She was rigid in general on the article of
making the public itself affix its stamps, and found a special enjoyment
in dealing to that end with some of the ladies who were too grand to
touch them. She had thus a play of refinement and subtlety greater, she
flattered herself, than any of which she could be made the subject; and
though most people were too stupid to be conscious of this it brought her
endless small consolations and revenges. She recognised quite as much
those of her sex whom she would have liked to help, to warn, to rescue,
to see more of; and that alternative as well operated exactly through the
hazard of personal sympathy, her vision for silver threads and moonbeams
and her gift for keeping the clues and finding her way in the tangle. The
moonbeams and silver threads presente