An accident brought us together. I found myself one Monday morning in an omnibus staggering westward from Victoria—I was returning from a Sunday I’d spent at Wimblehurst in response to a unique freak of hospitality on the part of Mr. Mantell. She was the sole other inside passenger. And when the time came to pay her fare, she became an extremely scared, disconcerted and fumbling young woman; she had left her purse at home.
Luckily I had some money.
She looked at me with startled, troubled brown eyes; she permitted my proffered payment to the conductor with a certain ungraciousness that seemed a part of her shyness, and then as she rose to go, she thanked me with an obvious affectation of ease.
“Thank you so much,” she said in a pleasant soft voice; and then less gracefully, “Awfully kind of you, you know.”
I fancy I made polite noises. But just then I wasn’t disposed to be critical. I was full of the sense of her presence; her arm was stretched out over me as she moved past me, the gracious slenderness of her body was near me. The words we used didn’t seem very greatly to matter. I had vague ideas of getting out with her—and I didn’t.
That encounter, I have no doubt, exercised me enormously. I lay awake at night rehearsing it, and wondering about the next phase of our relationship. That took the form of the return of my twopence. I was in the Science Library, digging something out of the Encyclopædia Britannica, when she appeared beside me and placed on the open page an evidently premeditated thin envelope, bulgingly confessing the coins within.
“It was so very kind of you,” she said, “the other day. I don’t know what I should have done, Mr.—”
I supplied my name. “I knew,” I said, “you were a student here.”
“Not exactly a student. I—”
“Well, anyhow, I knew you were here frequently. And I’m a student myself at the Consolidated Technical Schools.”