Opposite the Clarendon Mill on the corner of East Street was a provision store with stands of fruit and vegetables encroaching on the pavement.  Janet’s eye was attracted by a box of olives.

“Oh Eda,” she cried, “do you remember, we saw them being picked—­in the movies?  All those old trees on the side of a hill?”

“Why, that’s so,” said Eda.  “You never would have thought anything’d grow on those trees.”

The young Italian who kept the store gave them a friendly grin.

“You lika the olives?” he asked, putting some of the shining black fruit into their hands.  Eda bit one dubiously with her long, white teeth, and giggled.

“Don’t they taste funny!” she exclaimed.

“Good—­very good,” he asserted gravely, and it was to Janet he turned, as though recognizing a discrimination not to be found in her companion.  She nodded affirmatively.  The strange taste of the fruit enhanced her sense of adventure, she tried to imagine herself among the gatherers in the grove; she glanced at the young man to perceive that he was tall and well formed, with remarkably expressive eyes almost the colour of the olives themselves.  It surprised her that she liked him, though he was an Italian and a foreigner:  a certain debonnair dignity in him appealed to her—­a quality lacking in many of her own countrymen.

And she wanted to talk to him about Italy,—­only she did not know how to begin,—­when a customer appeared, an Italian woman who conversed with him in soft, liquid tones that moved her ....

Sometimes on these walks—­especially if the day were grey and sombre—­Janet’s sense of romance and adventure deepened, became more poignant, charged with presage.  These feelings, vague and unaccountable, she was utterly unable to confide to Eda, yet the very fear they inspired was fascinating; a fear and a hope that some day, in all this Babel of peoples, something would happen!  It was as though the conflicting soul of the city and her own soul were one....

CHAPTER III

Lise was the only member of the Bumpus family who did not find uncongenial such distractions and companionships as were offered by the civilization that surrounded them.  The Bagatelle she despised; that was slavery—­but slavery out of which she might any day be snatched, like Leila Hawtrey, by a prince charming who had made a success in life.  Success to Lise meant money.  Although what some sentimental sociologists might call a victim of our civilization, Lise would not have changed it, since it produced not only Lise herself, but also those fabulous financiers with yachts and motors and town and country houses she read about in the supplements of the Sunday newspapers.  It contained her purgatory, which she regarded in good conventional fashion as a mere temporary place of detention, and likewise the heaven toward which she strained, the dwelling-place of light.  In short,