There was nothing bold in her manner.  Life had not taught her domination—­superciliousness of grace, which is the lordly power of some women.  Her longing for consideration was not sufficiently powerful to move her to demand it.  Even now she lacked self-assurance, but there was that in what she had already experienced which left her a little less than timid.  She wanted pleasure, she wanted position, and yet she was confused as to what these things might be.  Every hour the kaleidoscope of human affairs threw a new luster upon something, and therewith it became for her the desired—­the all.  Another shift of the box, and some other had become the beautiful, the perfect.

On her spiritual side, also, she was rich in feeling, as such a nature well might be.  Sorrow in her was aroused by many a spectacle—­an uncritical upwelling of grief for the weak and the helpless.  She was constantly pained by the sight of the white-faced, ragged men who slopped desperately by her in a sort of wretched mental stupor.  The poorly clad girls who went blowing by her window evenings, hurrying home from some of the shops of the West Side, she pitied from the depths of her heart.  She would stand and bite her lips as they passed, shaking her little head and wondering.  They had so little, she thought.  It was so sad to be ragged and poor.  The hang of faded clothes pained her eyes.

“And they have to work so hard!” was her only comment.

On the street sometimes she would see men working—­Irishmen with picks, coal-heavers with great loads to shovel, Americans busy about some work which was a mere matter of strength—­and they touched her fancy.  Toil, now that she was free of it, seemed even a more desolate thing than when she was part of it.  She saw it through a mist of fancy—­a pale, somber half-light, which was the essence of poetic feeling.  Her old father, in his flour dusted miller’s suit, sometimes returned to her in memory, revived by a face in a window.  A shoemaker pegging at his last, a blast man seen through a narrow window in some basement where iron was being melted, a bench-worker seen high aloft in some window, his coat off, his sleeves rolled up; these took her back in fancy to the details of the mill.  She felt, though she seldom expressed them, sad thoughts upon this score.  Her sympathies were ever with that under-world of toil from which she had so recently sprung, and which she best understood.

Though Hurstwood did not know it, he was dealing with one whose feelings were as tender and as delicate as this.  He did not know, but it was this in her, after all, which attracted him.  He never attempted to analyze the nature of his affection.  It was sufficient that there was tenderness in her eye, weakness in her manner, good nature and hope in her thoughts.  He drew near this lily, which had sucked its waxen beauty and perfume from below a depth of waters which he had never penetrated, and out of ooze and mould which he could not understand.  He drew near because it was waxen and fresh.  It lightened his feelings for him.  It made the morning worth while.