Yet it seemed to him that
she must guess.
Below them, what seemed to be the phantasm of a painted city, a
wilderness of housetops, of smoke-wreathed spires and chimneys,
stretched away to a murky, blood-red horizon. Even as they stood
there, a deeper color stained the sky, an angry sun began to sink
into the piled up masses of thick, vaporous clouds. The girl
watched with an air of sullen yet absorbed interest. Her
companion's eyes were still fixed wholly and critically upon her.
Who was she, he wondered? Why had she left her own country to
come to a city where she seemed to have no friends, no manner of
interest? In that caravansary of the world's stricken ones she
had been an almost unnoticed figure, silent, indisposed for
conversation, not in any obvious manner attractive. Her clothes,
notwithstanding their air of having come from a first-class
dressmaker, were shabby and out of fashion, their extreme
neatness in itself pathetic. She was thin, yet not without a
certain buoyant lightness of movement always at variance with her
tired eyes, her ceaseless air of dejection. And withal she was a
rebel. It was written in her attitude, it was evident in her
lowering, militant expression, the smouldering fire in her eyes
proclaimed it. Her long, rather narrow face was gripped between
her hands; her elbows rested upon the brick parapet. She gazed
at that world of blood-red mists, of unshapely, grotesque
buildings, of strange, tawdry colors; she listened to the medley
of sounds--crude, shrill, insistent, something like the groaning
of a world stripped naked--and she had all the time the air of
one who hates the thing she looks upon.
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