She was so freshly impressed with the new life-lights,
curious, tawdry, fascinating, revolting, above all sharp
and undisguised, of the world she had left, that she saw
them already projected with a verisimilitude which, if
she had possessed the art of it, would have made her
indeed famous. Her own power of realization, assured her
on this point--nobody could see, not divine but _see_,
as she did, without being able to reproduce; the one
implied the other. She fingered feverishly the strap of
the little hand-bag in her lap, and satisfied herself by
unlocking it with a key that hung on a String inside her
jacket. It had two or three photographs of the women she
knew among the company, another of herself in her stage
uniform, a bill of the play, her powder-puff and rouge-box,
a scrap of gold lace, a young Jew's letter full of blots
and devotion, a rather vulgar sapphire bracelet, some
artificial flowers, and a quantity of slips of paper of
all sizes covered with her own enigmatically rounded
handwriting. She put her hand in carefully and
searched--everything was there; and up from the bag came
a scent that made her shut her eyes and laugh with its
power to bring her experiences back to her.
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