roadway, thought she could see as its cause a small girl pushing a perambulator loaded with bundles of washing.  Her first impulse was pity—­“Poor little thing”; but the words were hardly in her mind before they were chased away by a faint indignation at the child for getting in the tram’s way.  Everybody ought to look where they were going.  Ev-ry bo-dy ought to look where they were go-ing, said the pitching tramcar.  Ev-ry bo-dy....  Oh, sickening!  Jenny looked at her neighbour’s paper—­her refuge.  “Striking speech,” she read.  Whose?  What did it matter?  Talk, talk....  Why didn’t they do something?  What were they to do?  The tram pitched to the refrain of a comic song:  “Actions speak louder than words!” That kid who was wheeling the perambulator full of washing....  Jenny’s attention drifted away like the speech of one who yawns, and she looked again at her reflection.  The girl in the sliding glass wouldn’t say much.  She’d think the more.  She’d say, when Sir Herbert pressed for his answer, “My thoughts are my own, Sir Herbert Mainwaring.”  What was it the girl in One of the Best said?  “You may command an army of soldiers; but you cannot still the beating of a woman’s heart!” Silly fool, she was.  Jenny had felt the tears in her eyes, burning, and her throat very dry, when the words had been spoken in the play; but Jenny at the theatre and Jenny here and now were different persons.  Different?  Why, there were fifty Jennys.  But the shrewd, romantic, honest, true Jenny was behind them all, not stupid, not sentimental, bold as a lion, destructively experienced in hardship and endurance, very quick indeed to single out and wither humbug that was within her range of knowledge, but innocent as a child before any other sort of humbug whatsoever.  That was why she could now sneer at the stage-heroine, and could play with the mysterious beauties of her own reflection; but it was why she could also be led into quick indignation by something read in a newspaper.

Tum-ty tum-ty tum-ty tum, said the tram.  There were some more shops.  There were straggling shops and full-blazing rows of shops.  There were stalls along the side of the road, women dancing to an organ outside a public-house.  Shops, shops, houses, houses, houses ... light, darkness....  Jenny gathered her skirt.  This was where she got down.  One glance at the tragic lady of the mirror, one glance at the rising smoke that went to join the general cloud; and she was upon the iron-shod stairs of the car and into the greasy roadway.  Then darkness, as she turned along beside a big building into the side streets among rows and rows of the small houses of Kennington Park.

iii