looked at it resting on the stand. She looked soothed and
satisfied. Her manner became full of self-confidence. She
sent for shoe after shoe; she tried on pair after pair. She
got up and pirouetted before a glass which reflected the
foot only in yellow shoes, in fawn shoes, in shoes of lizard
skin. She raised her little skirts and displayed her little legs.
She was thinking that, after all, feet are the most important
part of the whole person; women, she said to herself, have
been loved for their feet alone. Seeing nothing but her feet,
she imagined perhaps that the rest of her body was of a
piece with those beautiful feet. She was shabbily dressed,
but she was ready to lavish any money upon her shoes. And
as this was the only occasion upon which she was not afraid
of being looked at but positively craved attention, she was
ready to use any device to prolong the choosing and fitting.
Look at my feet, look at my feet, she seemed to be saying,
as she took a step this way and then a step that way. The
shop girl good-humoredly must have said something
flattering, for suddenly her face lit up in an ecstasy. But,
after all, the giantesses, benevolent though they were, had
their own affairs to see to; she must make up her mind;
she must decide which to choose. At length, the pair was
chosen and, as she walked out between her guardians, with
the parcel swinging from her finger, the ecstasy faded,
knowledge returned, the old peevishness, the old apology
came back, and by the time she had reached the street again
she had become a dwarf.
But she had changed the mood; she had called into
being an atmosphere which, as we followed her out into
the street, seemed actually to create the humped, the
twisted, the deformed. Two bearded men, brothers, ap-
parently, stone-blind, supporting themselves by resting a
hand on the head of a small boy between them, marched
down the street. On they came with the unyielding yet
tremulous tread of the blind, which seems to lend to their
approach something of the terror and inevitability of the