when you saw her
the other evening....

"No, I won't ask you how she struck you when you talked to her: I know.
She struck you like that stuff I gave you to read last night She's
conformed--I've conformed--the mills have caught us and ground us:
ground us, oh, exceedingly small!

"But you remember what she was; and that's the reason why I'm telling
you this now....

"You may recall that after my father's death I tried to sell the Works.
I was impatient to free myself from anything that would keep me tied to
New York. I don't dislike my trade, and I've made, in the end, a fairly
good thing of it; but industrialism was not, at that time, in the line
of my tastes, and I know now that it wasn't what I was meant for.
Above all, I wanted to get away, to see new places and rub up against
different ideas. I had reached a time of life--the top of the first
hill, so to speak--where the distance draws one, and everything in the
foreground seems tame and stale. I was sick to death of the particular
set of conformities I had grown up among; sick of being a pleasant
popular young man with a long line of dinners on my list, and the dead
certainty of meeting the same people, or their prototypes, at all of
them.

"Well--I failed to sell the Works, and that increased my discontent.
I went through moods of cold unsociability, alternating with sudden
flushes of curiosity, when I gloated over stray scraps of talk overheard
in railway stations and omnibuses, when strange faces that I passed in
the street tantalized me with fugitive promises. I wanted to be among
things that were unexpected and unknown; and it seemed to me that nobody
about me understood in the least what I felt, but that somewhere just
out of reach there was some one who _did_, and whom I must find or
despair....

"It was just then that, one evening, I saw Mrs. Trant for the first
time.

"Yes: I know--you wonder what I mean. I'd known her, of course, as a
girl; I'd met her several times after her marriage; and I'd lately been
thrown with her, quite intimately and continuously, during a succession
of country-house visits. But I had never, as it happened, really _seen_
her....

"It was at a dinner at the Cumnors'; and there she was, in front of the
very tapestry we saw her against the other evening, with people about
her, and her face turned from me, and nothing noticeable or different
in her dress or manner; and suddenly she stood out for me against the
familiar u