Gerald Marks sighed heavily and stepped into the small hovel that passed for a bus stop shelter. He fussed for a moment, seeing the bench, then sat, grimacing as his suit was surely given a light coat of dust. His car had broken down about a mile down the road from the bus stop. He was hoping for a bus that went at least into the city, so he could get back to his apartment.

   Two buses and nothing to the city later, Gerald was joined by a young woman, perhaps 24 to his 37. She had come walking up from the side of the shelter, giving him the impression that she was perhaps from the group of houses he had seen far off in the back. He knew that he was nothing close to ugly, but didn’t want the attractive woman thinking him among the beautiful insane, so he refrained from banging his head against the wall as the third bus that day displayed the name of a town nowhere close to where he needed to be. He observed his silent companion from the corner of his eye.

    She looked to be… not in his social group, to put it nicely. She wore jeans with small tears in them and lightly fraying hems. Her shirt was faded and looked like it had gone through a particularly ferocious gardening competition some amount of washings previous. It displayed the loud and colorful logo of a band whose name he couldn’t make out from his vantage point. Her hair was long and loose, spilling over her shoulders. The ends were untrimmed, probably for several months, and no attempt at styling was made other than a remarkably clean part. Her face was untouched by makeup, not that she truly need, and that was what Gerald found the most striking. Even those women who didn’t live in the nicer parts of town had to have some standard as to looks? Surely they didn’t just walk around and expect to find boyfriends and husbands looking as though they had just put in a hard day’s work all the time?

   He realized that he was perhaps judging a little too much on appearance, and he didn’t really care that much about money, but he couldn’t really conceive of a world where people didn’t care about them. He watched subtly as she turned the page of her book, and then stopped dead as he saw the glint on her finger. There, on her right hand ring finger, was a gold ring that could be nothing less than real diamond.