“Miss _Humfray!_ How slow you are! _Pull_ it!”
Mrs. Chater grabbed the turned-back wrist. A crack answered the jerk, and the glove split away in her hand. “_There!_ Not my fault. Next time, perhaps, you will buy gloves sufficiently large. Oh, my poor heart! Now, feel. _Press!_”
The girl bit her lip. Humiliation lumped in her throat. She pressed, as bid, into that heaving blouse; said she could feel it. It was not very violent, she thought. Perhaps if Mrs. Chater lay back and closed her eyes--
“_I_ was not able to jump out, you see,” said Mrs. Chater, sinking.
“Oh, you don't think I _jumped_ out--and left you? I _wouldn't_. Besides, it is the most dangerous thing to do. That would have prevented me in any case. I was thrown. I thought I was going to be killed.”
The words came faintly. Nearly the girl was crying. That lump in her throat seemed to be squeezing tears from her eyes--silly tears. She did not want Mrs. Chater's sympathy, yet could not but reflect what disregard for her the utter absence of inquiry showed. Bitter thoughts yet more dangerously squeezed the tears. She was a paid _thing_, that was all--not even a servant. Mrs. Chater was on kindly terms with her servants--had experienced the servant problem and craftily evaded it by the familiarity that was too useful to produce contempt--knew her maids' young men, entered into their quarrels with their young men, read their young men's letters.
Gazing through the cab window, pressed into her corner, the girl felt herself friendless, outcast, alone. Again she told herself that she did not want Mrs. Chater's sympathy; yet it was the studied withholding of it--studied or callous because so natural, the merest conventionalism, to have asked, “Were you hurt?”--that made her acutely feel her position.
A paradox, she thought, not to want a thing and yet to be wounded because it was not hers. A ridiculous paradox--and brightly she tried to smile at the silliness of it; blinking the tears that were swelling now, her face turned against the window towards the pavement.
A tall, slim girl was passing, holding the arm of a nice-looking little old man with a grey moustache and military air. The tall, slim girl was laughing down at him, and he looked to be chuckling merrily, just as--Her mind swung off, and the tears must be blinked again.