“Well, you see, I was intent on other matters,” said Jem, looking down into the flushed and adorable face, which flushed the more adorably at his words. He bent to her. “Dearest of my heart,” he said passionately, “what does it all matter in comparison with you!”
Stepping gloriously from rose-tipped cloud to rose-tipped cloud as youth may do when winged with happiness and love, Jeremy, on his way office-ward, presently found himself at the Inter-Urban terminal being accosted by a man who said: “If you are deaf, I can make signs.”
“I beg your pardon,” apologized Jeremy hastily. “Were you speaking to me?”
“Only three times,” said the stranger. “So far,” he added.
Thus recalled from his castle-building the editor contemplated his interceptor. The man was a stranger in town. He carried a small, nondescript bag. He looked like a country minister on a week-day, or a prosperous plumber off the job, or a middle-aged clerk on an errand, or any one of a hundred other everyday individuals. In fact he was in face, figure, dress, and manner, the most commonplace, humdrum, unremarkable, completely average individual that Jeremy had ever encountered. He might have posed as the composite photograph of a convention of ten thousand Average Citizens.
“I was asking you: do you know this city,” he was saying patiently.
Now Jeremy possessed a singularly retentive visual memory. This memory had suddenly started working with a jar. “I do,” he said. “Do I know you?”
“You do not,” said the man.
“I’m not so sure,” retorted Jeremy. “I seem to remember a talk at the Owl’s Nest in Philadelphia, six years ago or so, by a distinguished globe-trotter and war correspondent. Now if you had n’t told me that I did not know you, I would have said—”