Her personality still defied the efforts of his imagination, but he ended by convincing himself that he would know her when he saw her. But counting up the women on Fifth Avenue towards whom he had felt instinctively drawn, and finding that the number had already reached eleven, began to doubt his intuition. On the morning of the third day he met Ann by chance in a bookseller's shop. Her back was towards him. She was glancing through Aston Rowant's latest volume.
"What I," said the cheerful young lady who was attending to her, "like about him is that he understands women so well."
"What I like about him," said Ann, "is that he doesn't pretend to."
"There's something in that," agreed the cheerful young lady. "They say he's here in New York."
Ann looked up.
"So I've been told," said the cheerful young lady.
"I wonder what he's like?" said Ann.
"He wrote for a long time under another name," volunteered the cheerful young lady. "He's quite an elderly man."
It irritated Matthew. He spoke without thinking.
"No, he isn't," he said. "He's quite young."