<div class="floatleft">(https://elliquiy.com/elluiki/images/3/3a/Yulturn.png)</div><hr/><span class="bbc_size" style="font-size: 18pt;"><strong>JULIET DEMALURE | 23 | SOCIETY WOMAN? DIMINISHED HEIR? </strong></span><hr/><br/>Battered. Pummeled. Regarded. Watched. Disregarded. Dismissed.<br/><br/>Battered... pummeled... not physically. Well, not always. The trip to New York and the rattling, strange train trip to Philadelphia had been far more unusual to the young Breton. After two months, she returned in a daze, as if she were walking on the ocean. Philadelphia was one thing, the former American capital smaller than she expected, ordinary, a little bland. New York was foreboding, its gridwork of streets, its thousands of wagon wheels turning all at once, the shouts of vendors, the smell of pig shit and horse urine far more pungent than in Paris or London. The clapboard lean-tos in alleys, the sulking, savage faces.<br/><br/>Fortunately, she had slipped into higher society, if by no means unto the denizens descended from Gotham's Four Hundred a generation or two before, nor the sons of J.P. Morgan. Her brief ascent was enough to taste the salons of the middle-wealthy, see the modish flappers and the playboys, and... play with some of the boys. The girls were intimidating, slender sylphs, intoxicating with their short hair and skirts lashing briefly at their knees. She was happy to notice the light burr of her accent was mistaken to be Irish, Scottish, midlands, only sometimes continental. She practiced the gestures, the quips, the smiles of dismissal, of welcome. The times she muffed things, there were always new marks.<br/><br/>But the... the images. The behaviors. Was it normal? Was it... her? The streetsweeper turning to her... at first she thought it was a broomhandle, the dark, wooden thing, emerging from his white trousers. Not so wooden, was it? Stroking a wooden thing with such rapidness would develop... develop splinters, wouldn't it? And the police near the wagon one late Friday night, suddenly hooting at her. She turned, startled, to see them stroking each other, a strange configuration, wagging their tongues and pursing their tongues. One night, the concierge pressed him into the room at her hotel; only a well-placed thrust of her slender knee interrupted his progress. And then the dreams...<br/><br/>What was going on?<br/><br/>With disappointment, but some relief, she moved her return ticket and took the several-weeks journey back to her dreaded London. The red-headed Breton, as lovely as she might have been, was rather petite -- just above 5'2" in American terms, and a shade beneath 100 lbs. -- and as she revolved around the decks, taking her meals, she stayed to herself, a dejected and despondent little thing. One day, she might dress herself boyishly, the copious spill of her ginger hair tucked beneath a cap, the next she would dress in recently acquired finery -- or close -- wearing a necklace that might or might not have been worth quite a bit. Neither worked -- or worked too well: she remained a target of lewdness, and not of the sort she usually traded in.<br/><br/>When Dr. Brockman approached her, she looked up, stunned. Mouth open, passport in hand (turned over, to hide the French stripe), she did not know what to say. The first man to not expose himself almost immediately. "Oh! Yes," she finally emitted, using an American flatness to her English tongue, then revised her opinion. "I truly do not think -- please, don't put yourself out." Her 'r's' were too rolled. "Thank you, but I'm okay. Perfectly fine."<br/><br/>Yet her documents were processed. "Thank you," she nodded to the clerk. "So, this is England. Is that right? Does one say Britain? I can never keep it clear."