In other moments, when the world seemed all disorder and chaos,—­as Mr. Shivers described it,—­or when she felt within her, like demons, those inexpressible longings and desires, leaping and straining, pulling her, almost irresistibly, she knew not whither, Eda shone forth like a light in the darkness, like the beacon of a refuge and a shelter.  Eda had faith in her, even when Janet had lost faith in herself:  she went to Eda in the same spirit that Marguerite went to church; though she, Janet, more resembled Faust, being—­save in these hours of lowered vitality—­of the forth-faring kind ....  Unable to confess the need that drove her, she arrived in Eda’s little bedroom to be taken into Eda’s arms.  Janet was immeasurably the stronger of the two, but Eda possessed the masculine trait of protectiveness, the universe never bothered her, she was one of those persons—­called fortunate—­to whom the orthodox Christian virtues come as naturally as sun or air.  Passion, when sanctified by matrimony, was her ideal, and now it was always in terms of Janet she dreamed of it, having read about it in volumes her friend would not touch, and never having experienced deeply its discomforts.  Sanctified or unsanctified, Janet regarded it with terror, and whenever Eda innocently broached the subject she recoiled.  Once Eda exclaimed:—­“When you do fall in love, Janet, you must tell me all about it, every word!”

Janet blushed hotly, and was silent.  In Eda’s mind such an affair was a kind of glorified fireworks ending in a cluster of stars, in Janet’s a volcanic eruption to turn the world red.  Such was the difference between them.

Their dissipations together consisted of “sundaes” at a drug-store, or sometimes of movie shows at the Star or the Alhambra.  Stereotyped on Eda’s face during the legitimately tender passages of these dramas was an expression of rapture, a smile made peculiarly infatuate by that vertical line in her cheeks, that inadequacy of lip and preponderance of white teeth and red gums.  It irritated, almost infuriated Janet, to whom it appeared as the logical reflection of what was passing on the screen; she averted her glance from both, staring into her lap, filled with shame that the relation between the sexes should be thus exposed to public gaze, parodied, sentimentalized, degraded....  There were, however, marvels to stir her, strange landscapes, cities, seas, and ships,—­once a fire in the forest of a western reserve with gigantic tongues of orange flame leaping from tree to tree.  The movies brought the world to Hampton, the great world into which she longed to fare, brought the world to her!  Remote mountain hamlets from Japan, minarets and muezzins from the Orient, pyramids from Egypt, domes from Moscow resembling gilded beets turned upside down; grey houses of parliament by the Thames, the Tower of London, the Palaces of Potsdam, the Tai Mahal.  Strange lands indeed, and stranger peoples! booted Russians in blouses, naked Equatorial savages tattooed