Thus Eda Rawle was brought in contact with values she herself was
powerless to detect, and which did not become values until they had
passed through Janet. One "educative" reel they had seen had begun with
scenes in a lumber camp high in the mountains of Galicia, where grow
forests of the priceless pine that becomes, after years of drying and
seasoning, the sounding board of the Stradivarius and the harp. Even then
it must respond to a Player. Eda, though failing to apply this poetic
parallel, when alone in her little room in the Welsh boarding-house often
indulged in an ecstasy of speculation as to that man, hidden in the mists
of the future, whose destiny it would be to awaken her friend. Hampton
did not contain him,--of this she was sure; and in her efforts to
visualize him she had recourse to the movies, seeking him amongst that
brilliant company of personages who stood so haughtily or walked so
indifferently across the ephemeral brightness of the screen.

By virtue of these marvels of the movies: Hampton ugly and sordid
Hampton!--actually began for Janet to take on a romantic tinge. Were not
the strange peoples of the earth flocking to Hampton? She saw them
arriving at the station, straight from Ellis Island, bewildered, ticketed
like dumb animals, the women draped in the soft, exotic colours many of
them were presently to exchange for the cheap and gaudy apparel of Faber
Street. She sought to summon up in her mind the glimpses she had had of
the wonderful lands from which they had come, to imagine their lives in
that earlier environment. Sometimes she wandered, alone or with Eda,
through the various quarters of the city. Each quarter had a flavour of
its own, a synthetic flavour belonging neither to the old nor to the new,
yet partaking of both: a difference in atmosphere to which Janet was
keenly sensitive. In the German quarter, to the north, one felt a sort of
ornamental bleakness--if the expression may be permitted: the tenements