fulness. It was the round of unessentials which all
office-women know so desperately well. She bruised herself by shrinking
from those hourly insults to her intelligence; and outside the office
her most absorbing comfort was in the luxury of mourning--passion in
black, even to the black-edged face-veil.... Though she was human enough
to realize that with her fair hair she looked rather well in mourning,
and shrewd enough to get it on credit at excellent terms.

She was in the office all day, being as curtly exact as she could. But
in the evening she sat alone in her flat and feared the city.

Sometimes she rushed down to the Sessionses' flat, but the good people
bored her with their assumption that she was panting to know all the
news from Panama. She had drifted so far away from the town that the
sixth assertion that "it was a great pity Kitty Wilson was going to
marry that worthless Clark boy" aroused no interest in her. She was
still more bored by their phonograph, on which they played over and over
the same twenty records. She would make quick, unconvincing excuses
about having to hurry away. Their slippered stupidity was a desecration
of her mother's memory.

Her half-hysterical fear of the city's power was increased by her daily
encounter with the clamorous streets, crowded elevators, frantic
lunch-rooms, and, most of all, the experience of the Subway.

Amazing, incredible, the Subway, and the fact that human beings could
become used to it, consent to spend an hour in it daily. There was a
heroic side to this spectacle of steel trains clanging at forty miles an
hour beneath twenty-story buildings. The engineers had done their work
well, made a great thought in steel and cement. And then the business
men and bureaucrats had made the great thought a curse. There was in the
Subway all the romance which story-telling youth goes seeking: trains
crammed with an inconceivable complexity of people--marquises of the
Holy Roman Empire, Jewish factory hands, speculators from Wyoming, Iowa
dairymen, quarreling Italian lovers, with their dramatic tales, their
flux of every human emotion, under the city mask. But however striking
these dramatic characters may be to the occasional spectator, they
figure merely as an odor, a confusion, to the permanent serf of the
Subway.... A long underground station, a catacomb with a cement
platform, this was the chief feature of the city vista to the tired girl
who waited there each mornin