A woman dropped down beside him on the bench. She was young in actual years--not more than twenty-three--but her body had been slashed by a premature herald of middle age and her rounded face was too softly plump and wrinkled a little under the eyes and below the chin. Youth and age were stiffly twined about her in lines that protested against each other. Her body was short and held a slenderness that was unnaturally puffed a bit here and there, giving an impression of incongruous inflation rather than of solid flesh. Her black hair was a plentiful mass of artificial curls and pressed against a wide straw hat, festooned with tulips made of gaudy cloth, and she was clad in loosely white muslin with a crimson sash around her waist. The effect was that of a school girl playing the part of a street walker in an amateur theatrical and, if you looked at her clothes alone, the illusion remained. It was only destroyed by a glance at her face, for the outward costumes of reality are often unconsciously amateurish, as though they were striving to obliterate the professional aspect held by the faces of human beings--a psychic confession. Men and women can never quite memorize their parts in life and their clothes sometimes express this absent-mindedness. As he looked at this woman Carl noticed that her eyes were not those of the usual flesh trader--shifting and infantile--but were filled with a tense distraction. The mere sullen aftermath of whiskey, or the departure of a man? No, it almost seemed that she was actually brooding over emotions that had removed her leagues from the bench against which her body was pressed. Eyes are often unwitting traitors and they tell the truth more readily than the rest of the face, or words, since human beings are not so conscious of what their eyes are announcing. The two holes in the mask of the face are often transparent or careless admissions, while the remainder of the face is immersed in a more successful deception. Carl was interested by the fact that this woman seemed to ignore his presence and was staring straight ahead of her. He began to believe that her indifference was genuine and he watched her more closely. Finally she tossed her head, with a gesture that expressed the defiant return of consciousness, and glanced at him. Then she threw him the usual “Hello, honey,” and with a disgusted grimace he dismissed a certain ghostly audience within him, telling it that the play would not begin. For a while he spoke to her, throwing slang pebbles at her with an oppressed exactitude and brushing aside her lustreless insinuations, a little weary of the unconvincing comedy. Suddenly the stunt nauseated him and he fled back to his own metaphoric tongue.