Page:The Whisper on the Stair by Lyon Mearson (1924).djvu/94

 him—for it was but during the merest part of a second that she looked at him frankly, was almost calculatingly cold in its process of weighing this man who sat opposite her. For that instant it almost seemed as though she looked at him not as a man who was there because he was interested in her, but as a tool that a workman finds ready to his hand, a sword a soldier finds conveniently placed so that he can use it.

“Curious that we should meet like this, isn’t it?” She looked at him with frank approval now—he had been weighed in that instant. “I mean,” she went on in a small sudden panic, afraid that it would seem to him that their juxtaposition was appearing very fateful and important in her eyes, “it’s funny how people meet, isn’t it. Just an accident—and there you are.”

He did not answer for an instant, while he bit into an olive with his fine, even white teeth.

“All meetings are like that,” he said when he did break the silence. “People meet—they must meet some way—by the most trivial sort of chances, by the most ordinary sort of accidents. When you look back on it later you say that it is curious you meet by just such an accident or chance—but if you look back on any acquaintance you have you will find it was an ordinary accident that brought you together—just the chance of your having been somewhere together—at the same time—and somebody there to introduce you, perhaps; life is made up of just such ‘accidents’—we go rushing along in our mad careers, like funny, busy little bugs, until, by chance, we bunk into each other—which is the first time we ever really haul off and take a good square look. And then we say we met by accident, and we don’t realize that an accident is the only way we can ever meet. Every formal introduction is an accident,