have been some other, and happily minor, fields that were not won--that
were more or less lost. Where did this loss take place, if the gains
were secured at football? This inquiry is not quite so cheerful as the
other. But while the victories were once going forward in the
playground, the defeats or disasters were once going forward in some
other place, presumably. And this was surely the place that was not a
playground, the place where the future wives of the football players were
sitting still while their future husbands were playing football.

This is the train of thought that followed the grey figure of a woman on
a bicycle in Oxford Street. She had an enormous and top-heavy omnibus at
her back. All the things on the near side of the street--the things
going her way--were going at different paces, in two streams, overtaking
and being overtaken. The tributary streets shot omnibuses and carriages,
cabs and carts--some to go her own way, some with an impetus that carried
them curving into the other current, and other some making a straight
line right across Oxford Street into the street opposite. Besides all
the unequal movement, there were the stoppings. It was a delicate tangle
to keep from knotting. The nerves of the mouths of horses bore the whole
charge and answered it, as they do every day.

The woman in grey, quite alone, was immediately dependent on no nerves
but her own, which almost made her machine sensitive. But this alertness
was joined to such perfect composure as no flutter of a moment disturbed.
There was the steadiness of sleep, and a vigilance more than that of an
ordinary waking.

At the same time, the woman was doing what nothing in her youth could
well have prepared her for. She must have passed a childhood unlike the
ordinary girl's childhood, if her steadiness or her alertness had ever