of hopeless discomfort and veiled crime: more fitting, if one
looked deeper into the heart of things, at her thwarted woman's
form, her colorless life, her waking stupor that smothered pain
and hunger,--even more fit to be a type of her class. Deeper
yet if one could look, was there nothing worth reading in this
wet, faded thing, halfcovered with ashes? no story of a soul
filled with groping passionate love, heroic unselfishness,
fierce jealousy? of years of weary trying to please the one
human being whom she loved, to gain one look of real heart-
kindness from him? If anything like this were hidden beneath
the pale, bleared eyes, and dull, washed-out-looking face, no
one had ever taken the trouble to read its faint signs: not the
half-clothed furnace-tender, Wolfe, certainly. Yet he was kind
to her: it was his nature to be kind, even to the very rats
that swarmed in the cellar: kind to her in just the same way.
She knew that. And it might be that very knowledge had given to
her face its apathy and vacancy more than her low, torpid life.
One sees that dead, vacant look steal sometimes over the rarest,
finest of women's faces,--in the very midst, it may be, of their
warmest summer's day; and then one can guess at the secret of
intolerable solitude that lies hid beneath the delicate laces
and brilliant smile. There was no warmth, no brilliancy, no
summer for this woman; so the stupor and vacancy had time to
gnaw into her face perpetually. She was young, too, though no
one guessed it; so the gnawing was the fiercer.

She lay quiet in the dark corner, listening, through the
monotonous din and uncertain glare of the works, to the dull
plash of the rain in the far distance, shrinking back whenever
the man Wolfe happened to look towards her. She knew, in spite