The delicious resentment that some women at once rouse in others! By deep specialized instinct every woman in the car looked up as the girl went by. Sitting there for several hours they had tacitly constituted themselves a microcosm of Society, and now with professional shrewdness took stock of the alien. No sculptor, no practised sensualist, could have itemized her more fiercely. She was not “pretty,” but in some strangely dangerous way she was foreign to their comfortable cowardice. She was still untamed, unbroken. It was not fair, thought the plumper ladies (though unaware they were thinking it), that a woman of nubile age should still combine nymphlike grace with the gay insouciance of a boy. She was carrying her hat in her hand, and the dark twist of her uncropped hair annoyed them as much as, not long before, it would have annoyed them to see it short. They marked the flexile straightness of her figure, the hang and stuff of the skirt, the bend of foot and ankle; exactly appraised, by the small visible slope of stocking, the upper curves unseen. They noted the unbroken fall of her dark suit from armpit to hem as she was swung sideways by a swerve of the train and threw up one elbow to keep her balance. The ruddy young brakeman, meeting her just then, steadied her politely with his hand. She smiled as frankly as a lad. She didn’t even seem humiliated, Ruth thought, at having to pass through all these Pullmans on her way to the day coaches. But there was something deeper than that--something she couldn’t profitably discuss with Ben. With the clairvoyance of woman she saw, and resented, a creature somehow more detached and more determined than herself. In a vague way, for which no words were possible, she recognized a spirit not more happy but more finely unhappy; a spirit concerned with those impassioned curiosities of life which Ruth knew existed and yet knew not how to approach. She felt the shamed envy and anger that some bitter listener in the audience always feels toward the performer. There was something in that dark childish face and alert reckless figure that made Ruth feel soft and frilly and powdered with sugar. The girl was possessed by some essence, had some fatal current passing through her--something which, if generally admitted, would demand extensive revision of the comfortable world. That was it, perhaps: she looked as though she knew that things most women had agreed to regard as important, didn’t really matter. The Pullman microcosm resented this, as an anthology of prose would resent a poem that got into it by mistake. The only satisfaction it could have, and the explanation of its pitiless appraisal, was the knowledge that this poor creature too was mocked and fettered with a body, subject also to the dear horrors of flesh.