Page:Tales of two countries.djvu/21

Rh she was perhaps the only one in this whole long line of carriages who understood these low expressions of the dregs of Paris.

She began to look at the faces around her: it seemed to her as if she knew them all. She knew what they thought, what was passing in each of these tightly-packed heads; and little by little a host of memories streamed in upon her. She fought against them as well as she could, but she was not herself this evening.

She had not, then, lost the key to the secret drawer; reluctantly she drew it out, and the memories overpowered her.

She remembered how often she herself, still almost a child, had devoured with greedy eyes the fine ladies who drove in splendour to balls or theatres; how often she had cried in bitter envy over the flowers she laboriously pieced together to make others beautiful. Here she saw the same greedy eyes, the same inextinguishable, savage envy.

And the dark, earnest men who scanned the equipages with half-contemptuous, half-threatening looks—she knew them all.

Had not she herself, as a little girl, lain in a corner and listened, wide-eyed, to their talk about the injustice of life, the tyranny of the rich, and the rights of the labourer, which he had only to reach out his hand to seize?

She knew that they hated everything—the sleek