The fuzzy one was in his lair, proof-reading at his unkempt desk. The floor was littered at his feet. He was smoking a black tobacco in a blacker pipe. He wore no coat, no cuffs, and his sleeves were—um; it does not matter. He glared ("carnivorously," Letitia tells me) at the opening door.
"Evening," he said, and waited; but the envelope did not arise. So he rose himself, offering a seat in the midst of his clutter, a plain, pine, rope-mended chair, from which he pawed soiled sheets of copy and tattered exchanges that she might sit.
"Looks some like snow," he said.
"Yes," she assented. "I called, Mr. Butters—"
She paused uncertainly. It was her own voice that had disconcerted her, it was so tremulous.
"Another poem, I suppose," he said, fondly imagining that he had softened his voice to a tone of gallantry, but succeeding no better than might be expected of speech so hedged, so beset and baffled, so veritably bearded in its earward flight.
"You—you mentioned snow, I think," stammered Letitia. He had frightened her away, or she may have drawn back, half-divining, even in embarrassment, that the other, the more round-about, the snowy path, was the better way to approach her theme.
"Snow and east winds are the predictions, I believe, Miss Primrose."
"I dread the winter—don't you?" she ventured.