Fathers and daughters -- Fiction; London (England) -- Fiction; Man-woman relationships -- Fiction; Sisters -- Fiction
As soon as the tramcar had passed the bridge, lighted windows above the
shops broke the magic mirror and gave Jenny a new interest, until, as
they went onward, a shopping district, ablaze with colour, crowded with
loitering people, and alive with din, turned all thoughts from herself
into one absorbed contemplation of what was beneath her eyes. So
absorbed was she, indeed, that the conductor had to prod her shoulder
with his two fingers before he could recover her ticket and exchange it
for another. "'Arf asleep, some people!" he grumbled, shoving aside the
projecting arms and elbows which prevented his free passage between the
seats. "Feyuss please!" Jenny shrugged her shoulder, which seemed as
though it had been irritated at the conductor's touch. It felt quite
bruised. "Silly old fool!" she thought, with a brusque glance. Then she
went silently back to the contemplation of all the life that gathered
upon the muddy and glistening pavements below.
ii
In a few minutes they were past the shops and once again in darkness,
grinding along, pitching from end to end, the driver's bell clanging
every minute to warn carts and people off the tramlines. Once, with an
awful thunderous grating of the brakes, the car was pulled up, and
everybody tried to see what had provoked the sense of accident. There
was a little shouting, and Jenny, staring hard into the roadway, thought
she could see as its cause a small girl pushing a perambulator loaded
with bundles of washing. Her first impulse was pity--"Poor little
thing"; but the words were hardly in her mind before they were chased
away by a faint indignation at the child for getting in the tram's way.
Everybody ought to look where they were going. Ev-ry bo-dy ought to look
where they were go-ing, said the pitching tramcar. Ev-ry bo-dy.... Oh,
sickening! Jenny looked at her neighbour's paper--her refuge. "Striking
speech," she read. Whose? What did it matter? Talk, talk.... Why didn't
they do something? What were they to do? The tram pitched to the refrain
of a comic song: "Actions speak louder than words!" That kid who was
wheeling the perambulator full of washing.... Jenny's attention drifted
away like the speech of one who yawns, and she looked again at her
reflection. The girl in the sliding glass wouldn't say much. She'd think
the more. She'd say, when Sir Herbert pressed for his answer, "My
thoughts are my own, Sir Herbert Mainwaring." What was it the girl in
_One of the Best_ said? "You may command an army of soldiers; but you
cannot still the beating of a woman's heart!" Silly fool, she was. Jenny
had felt the tears in her eyes, burning, and her throat very dry, when
the words had been spoken in the play; but Jenny at the theatre and
Jenny here and now were different persons. Different? Why, there were
fifty Jennys. But the shrewd, romantic, honest, true Jenny was behind
them all, not stupid, not sentimental, bold as a lion, destructively
Public-domain text, read in full here on John Shaqi.
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