Mrs. Winstick had hidden behind the Superintendent of Stamps
and Stationery, to whom she was explaining, between spoonfuls of
strawberry ice her terrible situation. And from the lips of another
lady, whose face she knew, she heard after she had passed, "Don't you
think it's rather an _omnium gatherum_?"
It was like Hilda Howe to note at that moment, with serious interest,
how the little world about them had the same negative attitude for the
missionary priest beside her, presenting it with a hardly perceptible
difference. Within its limits there was plainly no room for him either.
His acquaintances--he had a few--bowed with the kind of respect which
implies distance, and in the wandering eyes of the others it was plain
that he did not exist. She saw, too, with a very delicate pleasure, that
he carried himself in his grave humility untouched and unconscious.
Expecting nothing, he was unaware that he received nothing. It was odd,
and in its way charming, that she who saw and knew drew from their
mutual grievance a sense of pitiful protection for him, the unconscious
one. For herself, the tide that bore her on was too deep to let these
things hurt her; she looked down and saw the soreness and humiliation of
them pictorially, at the bottom, gliding smoothly over.
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