is shoulder.

"Whither away?" he said, very distinctly in a curiously wheedling voice.
Ann Veronica stared at his foolish, propitiatory smile, his hungry gaze,
through one moment of amazement, then stepped aside and went on her way
with a quickened step. But her mind was ruffled, and its mirror-like
surface of satisfaction was not easily restored.

Queer old gentleman!

The art of ignoring is one of the accomplishments of every well-bred
girl, so carefully instilled that at last she can even ignore her own
thoughts and her own knowledge. Ann Veronica could at the same time ask
herself what this queer old gentleman could have meant by speaking to
her, and know--know in general terms, at least--what that accosting
signified. About her, as she had gone day by day to and from the
Tredgold College, she had seen and not seen many an incidental aspect
of those sides of life about which girls are expected to know nothing,
aspects that were extraordinarily relevant to her own position and
outlook on the world, and yet by convention ineffably remote. For all
that she was of exceptional intellectual enterprise, she had never
yet considered these things with unaverted eyes. She had viewed them
askance, and without exchanging ideas with any one else in the world
about them.

She went on her way now no longer dreaming and appreciative, but
disturbed and unwillingly observant behind her mask of serene
contentment.

That delightful sense of free, unembarrassed movement was gone.

As she neared the bottom of the dip in Piccadilly she saw a woman
approaching her from the opposite direction--a tall woman who at the
first glance seemed altogether beautiful and fine. She came along with
the fluttering assurance of some tall ship. Then as she drew nearer
paint showed upon her face, and a harsh purpose behind the quiet
expression of her open countenance, and a sort of unreality in her
splendor betrayed itself for which Ann Veronica could not recall the
right word--a word, half understood, that lurked and hid in her mind,
the word "meretricious." Behind this woman and a little to the side
of her, walked a man smartly dressed, with desire and appraisal in his
eyes. Something insisted that those two were mysteriously linked--that
the woman knew the man was there.

It was a second reminder that against her claim to go free and
untrammelled there was a case to be made, that after all it was true
that a girl does not go alone in the world