Planche's "History of British Costume," 2 vols. 2500b, in the Library of the British Museum, is a helpful work of reference. It is replete with information, and the wood-cuts are spirited. Its size and cumbersomeness, however, are disadvantages. It is emphatically a book you would not care to read in bed. Add to this, that it is forming the summit of an unsteady pile of books with which your arms are filled—that you are handicapped further with a big black fur muff, and that your nerves are already on edge with the strangeness of the place....
Crash!!!...
One heavy morocco-bound volume lay, open and face downward, on the floor; the other was following it fast, ringleader in a tragic glissade over the smooth black fur. Fenella bit her lip and did not quite suppress a word whose most obvious rhyme is "lamb." In a terror-struck flash she saw all the results of her carelessness: attendants bearing down upon her—expostulation—disgrace and final ejectment beyond those heavy swing doors that she never, never should have passed. She was really very frightened.
A man who had been ransacking the shelves by her side, with a long arm that reached easily from top to bottom of the bookcase, turned quickly at the smothered exclamation. With a swift movement of one hand, he stayed the avalanche, and with the other picked up the fallen volume from the floor.
"Oh! thank you—thank you!" said Fenella, almost hysterically. She was looking up—a good way up—into the kindest, grayest eyes she had ever seen.... Eyes!—eyes! the little, unprotected girl encountered them everywhere. In train or 'bus, in the street, in the untempered light of the lately constructed tube railway. Hard eyes; preoccupied eyes, full of some sick trouble of their own which passed her over, unseeing; bitter, arrogant eyes that seemed to find her beauty and her pretty clothes an offence; eyes vicious and bold, the worst of all, that would not leave her, that stung her cheeks, as though the heat of the evil passions behind them were being focussed upon her through a lens, and beneath whose level, insulting conjecture her flesh crept and her hands clenched themselves in an agony of shame and helpless anger. But these eyes were different to all the others. She could look at them as steadily as at a cloudy sky: they seemed full of some tender wisdom. And of humor too. Already their twinkle mitigated what she felt to be a tragedy.
The stranger took the books from her one by one and bestowed them compactly in the hollow of his own arm.
"Have you got a seat?" he asked.
"No," said Fenella, in an agitated whisper. "Can I go anywhere I like? Are they all free?"
The man's smile broadened and showed his fine long teeth.
"We'll try and find you a free one," he said. "Come on with me." His accent was strange; not quite English, yet not foreign.