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 are always indignant at a private income. Ruth knew Joyce at once as one of the lonely kind. While she had been sitting there, apparently idle and half asleep, she had turned her chair to command the aisle and was waiting intently to see her come back through their car.

The delicious resentment that some women at once rouse in others! By deep specialized instinct every woman in the car looked up as the girl went by. Sitting there for several hours they had tacitly constituted themselves a microcosm of Society, and now with professional shrewdness took stock of the alien. No sculptor, no practised sensualist, could have itemized her more fiercely. She was not "pretty," but in some strangely dangerous way she was foreign to their comfortable cowardice. She was still untamed, unbroken. It was not fair, thought the plumper ladies (though unaware they were thinking it), that a woman of nubile age should still combine nymphlike grace with the gay insouciance of a boy. She was carrying her hat in her hand, and the dark twist of her uncropped hair annoyed them as much as, not long before, it would have annoyed them to see it short. They marked the flexile straightness of her figure, the hang and stuff of the skirt, the bend of foot and ankle; exactly appraised, by the small visible slope