And the sight was extraordinarily, incomprehensibly tragic.

Sarah Gailey's timorous glance seemed to be saying: "I am terrified to go.

It isn't beyond my strength--it's beyond my spirit.

But I shall have to go, and I shall have to seem glad to go.
And nobody can save me!" And Miss Gailey's excellent silk dress, and her fine apron, and her primness and dignified manners, and her superb pretence of being undamaged struck Hilda as intolerably pathetic--so that she was obliged to look away lest she might weep at the sight of that pathos.

Yes, it was a fact that she could not bear to look! Nor could she bear to let her imagination roam into Miss Gailey's immediate past! She said to herself: "Only yesterday morning perhaps she didn't know where her next meal was coming from.