Audrey’s childlike and intense gaze had become extremely noticeable.  Jane Foley felt it upon herself, and grew a little self-conscious.  Susan Foley noticed it with eager and grim pride, and she made a sharp movement instead of saying:  “Yes, you do well to stare.  You’ve got something worth staring at.”

Nick noticed it, with moisture in her glittering, hysteric eyes.  Miss Ingate noticed it ironically.  “You, pretending to be a widow, and so knowing and so superior!  Why, you’re a schoolgirl!” said the expressive curve of Miss Ingate’s shut lips.

And, in fact, Audrey was now younger than she had ever been in Paris.  She was the girl of six or seven years earlier, who, at night at school, used to insist upon hearing stories of real people, either from a sympathetic teacher or from the other member of the celebrated secret society.  But she had never heard any tale to compare with Jane Foley’s.  It was incredible that this straightforward, simple girl at the table should be the world-renowned Jane Foley.  What most impressed Audrey in Jane was Jane’s happiness.  Jane was happy, as Audrey had not imagined that anyone could be happy.  She had within her a supply of happiness that was constantly bubbling up.  The ridiculousness and the total futility of such matters as motor-cars, fine raiment, beautiful boudoirs and correctness smote Audrey severely.  She saw that there was only one thing worth having, and that was the mysterious thing that Jane Foley had.  This mysterious thing rendered innocuous cruelty, stupidity and injustice, and reduced them to rather pathetic trifles.

“But I never saw all this in the papers!” Audrey exclaimed.

“No paper—­I mean no respectable paper—­would print it.  Of course, we printed it in our own weekly paper.”

“Why wouldn’t any respectable paper print it?”

“Because it’s not nice.  Don’t you see that I ought to have been at home mending stockings instead of gallivanting round with Liberal stewards and policemen and prison governors?”

“And why aren’t you mending stockings?” asked Audrey, with a delicious quizzical smile that crept gradually through the wonder and admiration in her face.

“You pal!” cried Jane Foley impulsively.  “I must hug you!” And she did.  “I’ll tell you why I’m not mending’ stockings, and why Susan has had to leave off mending stockings in order to look after me.  Susan and I worked in a mill when she was ten and I was eleven.  We were ‘tenters.’  We used to get up at four or five in the morning and help with the housework, and then put on our clogs and shawls and be at the mill at six.  We worked till twelve, and then in the afternoon we went to school.  The next day we went to school in the morning and to the mill in the afternoon.  When we were thirteen we left school altogether, and worked twelve hours a day in the mill.  In the evenings we had to do housework.  In fact, all our housework was done before half-past