She felt that, if she had a certain physical something, which she must lack, nothing else would matter--nothing she said or did.

It was baffling; for, there, before her eyes were precisely the charms of feature and figure that in other women, in far less degree, had set men, many men, quite beside themselves.

Her lip curled, and her eyes laughed satirically as she thought of the follies of those men--how they had let women lead them up and down in public places, drooling and sighing and seeming to enjoy their own pitiful plight.

If that expression of satire had not disappeared so quickly, she might have got at the secret of her "miserable failure." For, it was her habit of facing men with only lightly veiled amusement, or often frank ridicule, in her eyes, in the curve of her lips, that frightened them off, that gave them the uneasy sense that their assumptions of superiority to the female were being judged and derided.
But time was flying.

It was after three; the headache was still pounding in her temples, and her eyes did look almost as haggard and her skin almost as sallow as her grandmother had said.