gh recognizing a discrimination not to be found in her companion.
She nodded affirmatively. The strange taste of the fruit enhanced her
sense of adventure, she tried to imagine herself among the gatherers in
the grove; she glanced at the young man to perceive that he was tall and
well formed, with remarkably expressive eyes almost the colour of the
olives themselves. It surprised her that she liked him, though he was an
Italian and a foreigner: a certain debonnair dignity in him appealed to
her--a quality lacking in many of her own countrymen.

And she wanted to talk to him about Italy,--only she did not know how
to begin,--when a customer appeared, an Italian woman who conversed with
him in soft, liquid tones that moved her....

Sometimes on these walks--especially if the day were grey and
sombre--Janet's sense of romance and adventure deepened, became more
poignant, charged with presage. These feelings, vague and unaccountable,
she was utterly unable to confide to Eda, yet the very fear they
inspired was fascinating; a fear and a hope that some day, in all
this Babel of peoples, something would happen! It was as though the
conflicting soul of the city and her own soul were one....

CHAPTER III

Lise was the only member of the Bumpus family who did not find
uncongenial such distractions and companionships as were offered by the
civilization that surrounded them. The Bagatelle she despised; that was
slavery--but slavery out of which she might any day be snatched, like
Leila Hawtrey, by a prince charming who had made a success in life.
Success to Lise meant money. Although what some sentimental sociologists
might call a victim of our civilization, Lise would not have changed
it, since it produced not only Lise herself, but also those fabulous
financiers with yachts and motors and town and country houses she read
about in the supplements of the Sunday newspapers. It contained her
purgatory, which she regarded in good conventional fashion as a mere
temporary place of detention, and likewise the heaven toward which she
strained, the dwelling-place of light. In short, her philosophy was that
of the modern, orthodox American, tinged by a somewhat commercialized
Sunday school tradition of an earlier day, and highly approved by
the censors of the movies. The peculiar kind of abstinence once
euphemistically known as "virtue," particularly if it were combined
with beauty, never failed of its reward. Lise, in this sense,