and amazingly adorned, soldiers and sailors, presidents, princes and emperors brought into such startling proximity one could easily imagine one’s self exchanging the time of day!  Incredible to Janet how the audiences, how even Eda accepted with American complacency what were to her never-ending miracles; the yearning to see more, to know more, became acute, like a pain, but even as she sought to devour these scenes, to drink in every detail, with tantalizing swiftness they were whisked away.  They were peepholes in the walls of her prison; and at night she often charmed herself to sleep with remembered visions of wide, empty, treeshaded terraces reserved for kings.

But Eda, however complacent her interest in the scenes themselves, was thrilled to the marrow by their effect on Janet, who was her medium.  Emerging from the vestibule of the theatre, Janet seemed not to see the slushy street, her eyes shone with a silver light like that of a mountain lake in a stormy sunset.  And they walked in silence until Janet would exclaim: 

“Oh Eda, wouldn’t you love to travel!”

Thus Eda Rawle was brought in contact with values she herself was powerless to detect, and which did not become values until they had passed through Janet.  One “educative” reel they had seen had begun with scenes in a lumber camp high in the mountains of Galicia, where grow forests of the priceless pine that becomes, after years of drying and seasoning, the sounding board of the Stradivarius and the harp.  Even then it must respond to a Player.  Eda, though failing to apply this poetic parallel, when alone in her little room in the Welsh boarding-house often indulged in an ecstasy of speculation as to that man, hidden in the mists of the future, whose destiny it would be to awaken her friend.  Hampton did not contain him,—­of this she was sure; and in her efforts to visualize him she had recourse to the movies, seeking him amongst that brilliant company of personages who stood so haughtily or walked so indifferently across the ephemeral brightness of the screen.

By virtue of these marvels of the movies:  Hampton ugly and sordid Hampton!—­actually began for Janet to take on a romantic tinge.  Were not the strange peoples of the earth flocking to Hampton?  She saw them arriving at the station, straight from Ellis Island, bewildered, ticketed like dumb animals, the women draped in the soft, exotic colours many of them were presently to exchange for the cheap and gaudy apparel of Faber Street.  She sought to summon up in her mind the glimpses she had had of the wonderful lands from which they had come, to imagine their lives in that earlier environment.  Sometimes she wandered, alone or with Eda, through the various quarters of the city.  Each quarter had a flavour of its own, a synthetic flavour belonging neither to the old nor to the new, yet partaking of both:  a difference in atmosphere to which Janet was keenly sensitive.  In the German quarter, to the north, one felt a sort