The lifted straw hat, the inclined head, the mellow tones, the gray eyes (again benevolent), however unalarming in themselves, filled her with very real inquietude. Whatever he had done before, this, surely, was insupportable. She was about to turn away when her eye fell upon his extended arm and upon her luckless parasol.
“[I beg pardon,” he repeated, “but isn’t this yours?]”
The blood flew to her face again and it was with an embarrassment, a gaucherie, the like of which she could not remember, that she extended her hand toward the errant sunshade. No sound came from her lips; with bent head she took it from him. But as she walked on, she found that he was walking, too—with her, directly at her side. For a moment she was cold with terror.
“I hope you’ll let me go along,” he was saying coolly, “I’m really quite harmless. If you knew—if you only knew how dreadfully bored I’ve been, you really wouldn’t mind me at all.”
Patricia stole a hurried glance at him, her fears curiously diminished.
“I’m what the fallen call a victim of circumstances,” he went on. “I ask no worse fate for my dearest enemy than to be consigned without a friend to this wilderness of whitened stoops and boarded doors—to wait upon your city’s demigod, Procrastination. This I’ve done for forty-eight hours with a dear memory of a past but without a hope for the future. If the Fountain of Youth were to gush hopefully from the office water-cooler of my aged lawyer, he would eye it askance and sigh for the lees of the turbid Schuylkill.”
However she strove to lift her brows, Patricia was smiling now in spite of herself.
“I’ve followed the meandering tide down the narrow cañon you call Chestnut Street, watched the leisurely coal wagon and its attendant tail of trolleys, or sat in my hotel striving to dust aside the accumulating cobwebs, one small unquiet molecule of disconsolation. I’m stranded—marooned. By comparison, Crusoe was gregarious.”