But when I got outside I found she had gone, so I decided to seek my beloved Reading-Room and look up some articles on microbes.
CHAPTER VIII
THE GIRL WHO LOOKED INTERESTING
After a hard skirmish with the catalogue of the Reading-Room, which, with reference and counter-reference, defied me stubbornly, yet finally yielded to my assault, I found myself, three hours later, seated in an A.B.C. restaurant in Southampton Row.
From motives of economy I had given up eating dinners. Breakfast and a meat lunch were now my sole fortifying occasions, and of the latter this A.B.C. was oftenest the scene. I liked its friendly fires, its red plush chairs, its air of thrift and cheer. Behold me, then, a studiously shabby young man, eating a shilling lunch and wearing as a symbol of my servitude a celluloid collar. Little would you have dreamed that but two short months before I had been toying with terrapin in the gold room of Delmonico’s.
But such dramatic contrasts charm me, and I was placidly engaged in the excavation of a Melton Mowbray pie, when a girl in grey took a place at the next table. Her long mantle was rather the worse for wear, her hat a cheap straw. Her small hands were encased in cotton gloves, and her feet in foreign-looking shoes.
“Painfully poor,” I thought, “yet evidently a worshipper of the goddess Comme-il-faut.” Then—“Why, surely I know her? Surely it is my mysterious female of the matutinal Marathon.”
With timid hesitation she ordered a bun and milk. How interesting her voice was! It had a bell-like quality the more marked because she spoke with a strong inflection, and an odd precision of accent. A voice with colour, I thought; violet; yes, she had a violet voice.
But I had not seen her face, only beneath her low straw hat her hair of a gleamy brown, very fine of texture and so thick as to seem almost black. It was brought round in a coiled braid over each ear, and, where it parted at the back, showed a neck of ivory whiteness. Somewhat curiously I wished she would turn her head.
Then, as if to please me, she did so, and what I saw was almost the face of a child, so small and delicate of feature was it. It was almost colourless, of a pure pallor that contrasted with the rich darkness of her hair. The mouth was small and wistfully sweet, the chin rather long and fine, the cheeks faintly hollowed. Her brow, I noted, was broad and full, her eyebrows frank and well-defined. But it was the eyes themselves that arrested me. They were set far apart and of a rare and faultless sea-blue. Such eyes in a woman of real beauty would have been pools of love for many a fool to drown in, and even in this fragile, shrinking girl they were haunting, thrilling eyes. For the rest, she was small, slender, sad-looking, and tired, yes, tired, as if she wanted to rest and rest and rest.
“A consumptive type,” I thought irritably. “Seems quite worn out. Why does she persist in that pedestrian foolishness—that’s what I want to know?”