"forms," the straying of stamps and the ring of change over the counter,
the people she had fallen into the habit of remembering and fitting
together with others, and of having her theories and interpretations of,
kept up before her their long procession and rotation. What twisted the
knife in her vitals was the way the profligate rich scattered about them,
in extravagant chatter over their extravagant pleasures and sins, an
amount of money that would have held the stricken household of her
frightened childhood, her poor pinched mother and tormented father and
lost brother and starved sister, together for a lifetime. During her
first weeks she had often gasped at the sums people were willing to pay
for the stuff they transmitted--the "much love"s, the "awful" regrets,
the compliments and wonderments and vain vague gestures that cost the
price of a new pair of boots. She had had a way then of glancing at the
people's faces, but she had early learnt that if you became a
telegraphist you soon ceased to be astonished. Her eye for types
amounted nevertheless to genius, and there were those she liked and those
she hated, her feeling for the latter of which grew to a positive
possession, an instinct of observation and detection. There were the
brazen women, as she called them, of the higher and the lower fashion,
whose squanderings and graspings, whose struggles and secrets and love-
affairs and lies, she tracked and stored up against them till she had at
moments, in private, a triumphant vicious feeling of mastery and ease, a
sense of carrying their silly guilty secrets in her pocket, her small
retentive brain, and thereby knowing so much more about them than they
suspected or would care to think. There were those she would have liked
to betray, to trip up, to bring down with words altered and fatal; and
all through a personal hostility provoked by the lightest signs, by their
accidents of tone and manner, by the particular kind of relation she
always happened instantly to feel.