that the relation between the sexes should be thus exposed to public
gaze, parodied, sentimentalized, degraded.... There were, however,
marvels to stir her, strange landscapes, cities, seas, and ships,--once a
fire in the forest of a western reserve with gigantic tongues of orange
flame leaping from tree to tree. The movies brought the world to Hampton,
the great world into which she longed to fare, brought the world to her!
Remote mountain hamlets from Japan, minarets and muezzins from the
Orient, pyramids from Egypt, domes from Moscow resembling gilded beets
turned upside down; grey houses of parliament by the Thames, the Tower of
London, the Palaces of Potsdam, the Tai Mahal. Strange lands indeed, and
stranger peoples! booted Russians in blouses, naked Equatorial savages
tattooed and amazingly adorned, soldiers and sailors, presidents, princes
and emperors brought into such startling proximity one could easily
imagine one's self exchanging the time of day! Incredible to Janet how
the audiences, how even Eda accepted with American complacency what were
to her never-ending miracles; the yearning to see more, to know more,
became acute, like a pain, but even as she sought to devour these scenes,
to drink in every detail, with tantalizing swiftness they were whisked
away. They were peepholes in the walls of her prison; and at night she
often charmed herself to sleep with remembered visions of wide, empty,
treeshaded terraces reserved for kings.

But Eda, however complacent her interest in the scenes themselves, was
thrilled to the marrow by their effect on Janet, who was her medium.
Emerging from the vestibule of the theatre, Janet seemed not to see the
slushy street, her eyes shone with a silver light like that of a mountain
lake in a stormy sunset. And they walked in silence until Janet would
exclaim:

"Oh Eda, wouldn't you love to travel!"