general colourless gloom. A little white brooch at her neck
stood boldly out; and that was all that could be seen with any
clearness, as the light was not directly overhead. Her eyes were quite
lost, apparently, in deep shadows. Yet she could not resist the delight
of continuing narrowly to examine herself. The face she saw was hardly
recognisable as her own; but it was bewitchingly pale, a study in black
and white, the kind of face which, in a man, would at once have drawn
her attention and stimulated her curiosity. She had longed to be pale,
but the pallor she was achieving by millinery work in a stuffy room was
not the marble whiteness which she had desired. Only in the sliding
window could she see her face ideally transfigured. There it had the
brooding dimness of strange poetic romance. You couldn't know about that
girl, she thought. You'd want to know about her. You'd wonder all the
time about her, as though she had a secret.... The reflection became
curiously distorted. Jenny was smiling to herself.

As soon as the tramcar had passed the bridge, lighted windows above the
shops broke the magic mirror and gave Jenny a new interest, until, as
they went onward, a shopping district, ablaze with colour, crowded with
loitering people, and alive with din, turned all thoughts from herself
into one absorbed contemplation of what was beneath her eyes. So
absorbed was she, indeed, that the conductor had to prod her shoulder
with his two fingers before he could recover her ticket and exchange it
for another. "'Arf asleep, some people!" he grumbled, shoving aside the
projecting arms and elbows which prevented his free passage between the
seats. "Feyuss please!" Jenny shrugged her shoulder, which seemed as
though it had been irritated at the conductor's touch. It felt quite
bruised. "Silly old fool!" she thought, with a brusque glance. Then she
went silently back to the contemplation of all the life that gathered
upon the muddy and glistening pavements below.

ii

In a few minutes they were past the shops and once again in darkness,
grinding along, pitching from end to end, the driver's bell clanging
every minute to warn carts and people off the tramlines. Once, with an
awful thunderous grating of the brakes, the car was pulled up, and
everybody tried to see what had provoked the sense of accident. There
was a little shouting, and Jenny, staring hard into the roadway, thought
she could see as its cause a small girl pushing