Page:Claire Ambler (1928).djvu/20

 She knew what she did, but not why she did it; though she was ready with reasons, and could even less well bear a challenge to her conduct than one to her words. Thus, at seventeen, when she had her long and beautiful tresses shorn away, she was irritated with her mother for lamenting. Her hair was cut off, Claire said, because ridding herself of such a burden was "sensible"; and she believed this, not knowing that she bore the civilized disfigurement merely because it was borne by other maidens of the tribe, as mechanical and unwitting as herself. Again, she had been irritated with her father when he questioned the scantiness of her skirt; for this brevity, too, was "sensible," she said, being once more unaware that she had no motive except to follow the fashion of her kind, and did but manifest a mob contagion.

It seemed to her a long, long time since she had been a child, so long that she now had little interest in children—not much more than she had in old people—and both children and old people, like workingmen in flivvers, she felt, belonged to the duller and rather annoying classes. The only interesting persons in the world were of about her own age; in fact they were the only people who seemed to her actually alive; and yet even they were not wholly