always knew she was there." Miss Lottie Meyers, who worked in the office
of Mr. Orcutt, the superintendent across the hall, experienced a brief
infatuation that turned to hate. She chewed gum incessantly, Janet found
her cheap perfume insupportable; Miss Meyers, for her part, declared that
Janet was "queer" and "stuck up," thought herself better than the rest of
them. Lottie Meyers was the leader of a group of four or five which
gathered in the hallway at the end of the noon hour to enter animatedly
into a discussion of waists, hats, and lingerie, to ogle and exchange
persiflages with the young men of the paymaster's corps, to giggle, to
relate, sotto voce, certain stories that ended invariably in hysterical
laughter. Janet detested these conversations. And the sex question,
subtly suggested if not openly dealt with, to her was a mystery over
which she did not dare to ponder, terrible, yet too sacred to be
degraded. Her feelings, concealed under an exterior of self-possession,
deceptive to the casual observer, sometimes became molten, and she was
frightened by a passion that made her tremble--a passion by no means
always consciously identified with men, embodying all the fierce
unexpressed and unsatisfied desires of her life.

These emotions, often suggested by some hint of beauty, as of the sun
glinting on the river on a bright blue day, had a sudden way of
possessing her, and the longing they induced was pain. Longing for what?
For some unimagined existence where beauty dwelt, and light, where the
ecstasy induced by these was neither moiled nor degraded; where shame, as
now, might not assail her. Why should she feel her body hot with shame,
her cheeks afire? At such moments she would turn to the typewriter, her
fingers striking the keys with amazing rapidity, with extraordinary
accuracy and force,--force vaguely disturbing to Mr. Claude Ditmar as he
entered the office one morning and involuntarily paused to watch her. She
was unaware of his gaze, but her colour was like a crimson signal that