and value as a human unit. There was that in
her blood which assured her of a welcome, it had logic in it, with the
basis of her rarity, her force, her distinction among other women.
She pressed forward to human fellowship with a smile on her lips, as
a delightful matter of course, going towards the people who were not
indifferent to the fact that she was there, who could not be entirely,
since they had some sort of knowledge of her.

In no case did they ignore her, but they were so cheerfully engaged
in conversation that they were usually quite oblivious of her. She
encountered this animated absorption two or three times, then turning
she found that the absorbed ones had changed their places--were no
longer in her path. One lady put herself at a safe distance and then
bowed, with much cordiality. It was extraordinary in a group of five how
many glistening shoulders would be presented, quite without offence,
to her approach. Mrs. Winstick had hidden behind the Superintendent of
Stamps and Stationery, to whom she was explaining, between spoonfuls
of strawberry ice, her terrible situation. And from the lips of another
lady whose face she knew, she heard after she had passed, "Don't you
think it's rather an omnium gatherum?"

It was like Hilda Howe to note at that moment with serious interest,
how the little world about them had the same negative attitude for the
missionary priest beside her, presenting it with a hardly perceptible
difference. Within its limits there was plainly no room for him either.
His acquaintances--he had a few--bowed with the kind of respect which
implies distance, and in the wandering eyes of the others it was plain
that he did not exist. She saw, too, with a very delicate pleasure,
that he carried himself in his grave humility untouched and unconscious.
Expecting nothing he was unaware that he received nothing. It was odd,
and in its way charming, that she who saw and knew drew from their
mutual grievance a sense of pitiful protection for him, the unconscious
one. For herself, the tide that bore her on was too deep to let these
things hurt her, she looked down and saw the soreness and humiliation of
them pictorially, at the bottom, gliding smoothly over. They brought no
stereotype to her smile, no dissonance to what she found to say. When at
last she and Arnold sat down together her standpoint was still superior,
and she herself was so aloof from it all that she could talk about
it without bitte