could not define. Leaning back with half-closed eyes, he tried to
diagnose this new sensation. He found it disconcerting that the faces
and behaviour of his neighbours lacked anything he could grasp and
secretly abuse. They continued to converse with admirable and slightly
conscious phlegm, yet he knew, as well as if each one had whispered
to him privately, that this shady incident had shaken them. Something
unsettling to their notions of propriety-something dangerous and
destructive of complacency--had occurred, and this was unforgivable.
Each had a different way, humorous or philosophic, contemptuous, sour,
or sly, of showing this resentment. But by a flash of insight Shelton
saw that at the bottom of their minds and of his own the feeling was the
same. Because he shared in their resentment he was enraged with them and
with himself. He looked at the plump, sleek hand of the woman with the
Roman nose. The insulation and complacency of its pale skin, the passive
righteousness about its curve, the prim separation from the others of
the fat little finger, had acquired a wholly unaccountable importance.
It embodied the verdict of his fellow-passengers, the verdict of
Society; for he knew that, whether or no repugnant to the well-bred
mind, each assemblage of eight persons, even in a third-class carriage,
contains the kernel of Society.

But being in love, and recently engaged, Shelton had a right to be
immune from discontent of any kind, and he reverted to his mental image
of the cool, fair face, quick movements, and the brilliant smile that
now in his probationary exile haunted his imagination; he took out his
fiancee's last letter, but the voice of the young foreigner addressing
him in rapid French caused him to put it back abruptly.

"From what she tells me, sir," he said, bending forward to be out of
hearing of the girl, "hers is an unhappy case. I should have been only