“Why, everything has a name, even a pudding. I made a name for him at once. It is ‘the stranger who might have been observed——’”
They laughed. After the early dinner they went for a walk. None of your strolls, but a good steady eight miles. Coming home, they met the stranger: and then they talked about him again. For, fair reader, I cannot conceal from you that there are many girls who do think and talk about young men, even when they have not been introduced to them. Not really nice girls like yourself, fair reader—but ordinary, commonplace girls who have not your delicate natures, and who really do sometimes experience a fleeting sensation of interest even in the people whose names they don’t know.
Next morning they saw him at the station. The 9.1 took the bit in its teeth, and instead of being, as usual, the 9.30 something, became merely the 9.23. So for some twenty odd minutes the stranger not only might have been, but was, observed by four bright and critical eyes. I don’t mean that my girls stared, of course. Perhaps you do not know that there are ways of observing strangers other than by the stare direct. He looked sulkier than ever: but he also had eyes. Yet he, too, was far from staring, so far that the indignant Nina broke out in a distracted whisper: “There! you see! I’m not important enough for him even to perceive my existence. I’m always expecting him to walk on me. I wonder whether he’d apologise when he found I wasn’t the station door-mat?”
The stranger shrugged his shoulders all to himself in his second-class carriage when the train had started.
“‘Simply detestable!’ But how one talks prose without knowing it, all along the line! How can I ever have come enough into her line of vision to be distinguished by an epithet! And why this one? Detestable!”
The epithet, however distinguishing, seemed somehow to lack charm.
At Cannon Street Station the stranger looked sulkier than Nina had ever seen him. She said so, adding: “Than I’ve ever seen him? Oh—I’m wandering. He looks sulkier than I’vsquo;ve ever seen any one—sulkier than I’ve ever dreamed possible. Pig——”
Through the week, painting at the school and black and white work in the evenings filled Nina’s mind to the exclusion even of strangers who might, in more leisured moments, seem worthy of observation. She was aware of the sulky one on platforms, of course, but talking about him to Molly was more amusing somehow than merely thinking of him. When it came to thinking, the real, the earnest things of life—the Sketch Club, the chance of the Melville Nettleship Prize, the intricate hideousness of bones and muscles—took the field and kept it, against strangers and acquaintances alike.
Saturday, turning this week’s scribbled page to the fair, clear page of next week, brought the stranger back to her thoughts, and to eyes now not obscured by close realities.
He passed her on the platform, with a dozen bunches of violets in his hands.