faithful, cloth-gaitered feet a little outside their daily ruts, and
going to visit some relatives in a neighboring town; they were almost
overcome by the unusualness of it.

Jane Field was a woman after their kind, and the look on their faces
had its grand multiple in the look on hers. She had not only stepped
out of her rut, but she was going out of sight of it forever.

She sat there stiff and silent, her two feet braced against the
floor, ready to lift her at the signal of the train, her black
leather bag grasped firmly in her right hand.

The two women eyed her furtively. One nudged the other. "Know who
that is?" she whispered. But neither of them knew. They were from the
adjoining town, which this railroad served as well as Green River.

Sometimes Mrs. Field looked at them, but with no speculation; the
next moment she looked in the same way upon the belongings of the
little country depot--the battered yellow settees, the time-tables,
the long stove in its tract of littered sawdust, the man's face in
the window of the ticket-office.

"Dreadful cross-lookin', ain't she?" one of the women whispered in
the other's ear.

Jane heard the whisper, and looked at them. The women gave each other
violent pokes, they reddened and tittered nervously, then they tried
to look out of the window with an innocent and absent air. But they
need not have been troubled. Jane, although she heard the whisper
perfectly, did not connect it with herself at all. She never thought