Page:Terminations (New York, Harper and Brothers, 1895).djvu/217

Rh Later that evening (it was while he rolled along in a hansom on his way to dine out) he added that he hadn't taken in that she was so interesting. The next morning, in the midst of his work, he quite suddenly and irrelevantly reflected that his impression of her, beginning so far back, was like a winding river that had at last reached the sea.

His work was indeed blurred a little, all that day, by the sense of what had now passed between them. It wasn't much, but it had just made the difference. They had listened together to Beethoven and Schumann; they had talked in the pauses and at the end, when at the door, to which they moved together, he had asked her if he could help her in the matter of getting away. She had thanked him and put up her umbrella, slipping into the crowd without an allusion to their meeting yet again, and leaving him to remember at leisure that not a word had been exchanged about the place in which they frequently met. This circumstance seemed to him at one moment natural enough and at another perverse. She mightn't in the least have recognized his warrant for speaking to her; and yet, if she hadn't, he would have judged her an underbred woman. It was odd that, when nothing had really ever brought them together, he should have been able successfully to assume that they were in a manner old friends—that this negative quantity was somehow more than they could express. His success, it was true,