the world--where a human kaleidoscope tumbles continuously east and
west, no one had remarked her.

She would never forget the agony of that first meal in the great
dining room. She could have dined alone in her room; but courage
had demanded that she face the ordeal and have done with it. Every
eye seemed focussed upon her; and yet she had known the sensation
to be the conceit of her imagination.

The beautiful gowns and the flashing bare shoulders and arms of the
women had disturbed and distressed her. Women, she had been taught,
who exposed the flesh of their bodies under the eyes of man were in
a special catagory of the damned. Almost instantly she had
recognized the fallacy of such a statement. These women could not
be bad, else the hotel would not have permitted them to enter!
Still, the scene presented a riddle: to give immunity to the black
women who went about all but naked and to damn the white for
exposing their shoulders!

She had eaten but little; all her hunger had been in her eyes--and
in her heart. Loneliness--something that was almost physical: as if
the vitality had been taken out of the air she breathed. The
longing to talk to someone! But in the end she had gone to her room
without giving in to the craving.

Once in the room, the door locked, the sense of loneliness had
dropped away from her as the mists used to drop away from the
mountain in the morning. Even then she had understood vaguely that
she had touched upon some philosophy of life: that one was never
lonely when alone, only in the midst of crowds.