le. Jane
Foley felt it upon herself, and grew a little self-conscious. Susan Foley
noticed it with eager and grim pride, and she made a sharp movement instead
of saying: "Yes, you do well to stare. You've got something worth staring
at."

Nick noticed it, with moisture in her glittering, hysteric eyes. Miss
Ingate noticed it ironically. "You, pretending to be a widow, and so
knowing and so superior! Why, you're a schoolgirl!" said the expressive
curve of Miss Ingate's shut lips.

And, in fact, Audrey was now younger than she had ever been in Paris. She
was the girl of six or seven years earlier, who, at night at school, used
to insist upon hearing stories of real people, either from a sympathetic
teacher or from the other member of the celebrated secret society. But she
had never heard any tale to compare with Jane Foley's. It was incredible
that this straightforward, simple girl at the table should be the
world-renowned Jane Foley. What most impressed Audrey in Jane was Jane's
happiness. Jane was happy, as Audrey had not imagined that anyone could be
happy. She had within her a supply of happiness that was constantly
bubbling up. The ridiculousness and the total futility of such matters as
motor-cars, fine raiment, beautiful boudoirs and correctness smote Audrey
severely. She saw that there was only one thing worth having, and that was
the mysterious thing that Jane Foley had. This mysterious thing rendered
innocuous cruelty, stupidity and injustice, and reduced them to rather
pathetic trifles.

"But I never saw all this in the papers!" Audrey exclaimed.

"No paper--I mean no respectable paper--would print it. Of course, we
printed it in our own weekly paper."

"Why wouldn't any respectable paper print it?"

"Because it's not nice. Don't you see that I ought to have been at home
mending stockings instead of gallivanting round with Liberal stewards and
policemen and prison governors?"

"And why aren't you mending stockings?" asked Audrey, with a delicious
quizzical smile that crept gradually through the wonder and admiration in
her face.

"You pal!" cried Jane Foley impulsively. "I must hug you!" And she did.
"I'll tell you why I'm not mending' stockings, and why Susan has had to
leave off mending stockings in order to look after me. Susan and I worked
in a mill when she was ten and I was eleven. We were 'tenters.' We used to
get up at four or five in the morning and help with the housework, and then
put on ou