Glory sniffed inquiringly. She certainly could detect a whiff of it somewhere. “Yes—yes, I think I do,” she said.
“Then I'm going ahead. It's me,” the Other Girl cried sharply. “I ought to have remembered. I wouldn't enjoy sitting beside a rubber factory if I was somebody else—if I was you. I forgot—I'm sorry.”
She stood up and tried to pass out into the aisle in front of Glory, but Glory would not let her.
“Sit down, please—please. I don't smell it now, and anyway I like it. It's a variety. I'm tired of the perfume of white violets! If you don't mind, I wish you'd tell me some more about when you had to—stop, you know. I suppose you mean stop going to school, don't you?”
“Yes. It was when my father was killed in an accident. I had to stop then. There's only mother and me and ‘Tiny Tim.’ I went to work in the rubber factory—it was six months ago. I had just begun getting really into study, you know.”
The quiet voice was unsteady with intense wistfulness. The Other Girl's eyes were gazing out of the car window as if they saw lost opportunities and yearned over them. Glory could not see the longing in them until they turned suddenly toward her and she caught a wondering glimpse of it.
“We had never had much, you see, but after father was killed—after that there was only mother and me, and mother is sick. So of course I had to stop going to school. I should like to have had enough so I could teach instead of working in a factory—”
This much said, the Other Girl shrank into herself as if into a little shabby shell. The distance between the two girls seemed abruptly to have widened. All at once Glory's hands were delicately gloved and the Other Girl's bare and red; Glory's dress trim and beautiful, and the Other Girl's faded and worn; Glory's jacket buttons rich and handsome, the Other Girl's top button split. It seemed all to have happened in a moment when the Other Girl woke up. How could she have forgotten herself so and talked like that!
“I wish—if you'd just as lief—you'd go back to your seat now,” she said. “I—I never talked like that before to a stranger, and I ain't like you, you know. I've explained about the books. I studied them last night, but I don't think I hurt them any.”
“I guess you did them good,” laughed Glory, brightly. “I expect to find an inspiration between the pages—why, actually, I feel a little bit (oh, a very little) of interest already in history. How delighted Aunt Hope would feel if she knew!—No, I'm not going back to my seat. Why, here's Centre Town! Did you ever see such a short ride! I've got to get off here, and I wish I hadn't—oh, dear! Good-by.”