He made short work of settling himself in Paris, taking a cheap furnished room near the Bibliothèque Nationale,[117-1] ] discovering at once the inexpensive and nourishing qualities of crèmeries and the Duval restaurants, and adapting himself to the eccentricities of Paris weather in March with flannel underwear and rubber overshoes. He attacked the big folios in the library with ferocious energy, being the first to arrive in the huge, quiet reading-room, and leaving it only at the imperative summons of the authorities. He had barely enough money to last through March, April, and May, and, as he wrote in his long Sunday afternoon letters to Maggie Warner, he would rather work fifteen hours a day now while he was fresh at it, than be forced to, later on, when decent weather began, and when he hoped to go about a little and make some of the interesting historical pilgrimages in the environs of Paris.
He made a point of this writing his fiancée every detail of his plans, as well as all the small happenings of his monotonous and laborious life; and so, quite naturally, he described to her the beginning of his acquaintance with Agatha Midland.
"I'd spotted her for English," he wrote, "long before I happened to see her name on a notebook. Don't it sound like a made-up name out of an English novel? And that is the way she looks, too. I understand now why no American girl is ever called Agatha. To fit it you have to look sort of droopy all over, as if things weren't going to suit you, but you couldn't do anything to help it, and did not, from sad experience, have any rosy hopes that somebody would come along to fix things right. I'm not surprised that when English women do get stirred up over anything—for instance, like voting, nowadays—they fight like tiger-cats. If this Agatha-person is a fair specimen, they don't look as though they were used to getting what they want any other way. But here I go, like every other fool traveler, making generalizations about a whole nation from seeing one specimen. On the other side of me from Miss Midland usually sits an old German, grubbing away at Sanskrit roots. The other day we got into talk in the little lunchroom here in the same building with the library, where all we readers go to feed, and he made me so mad I couldn't digest my bread and milk. Once, just once, when he was real young, he met an American woman student—a regular P. G. freak, I gather—and nothing will convince him that all American girls aren't like her. 'May God forgive Christopher Columbus!' he groans whenever he thinks of her...."
There was no more in this letter about his English neighbor, but in the next, written a week later, he said:
"We've struck up an acquaintance, the discouraged-looking English girl and I, and she isn't so frozen-up as she seems. This is how it happened. I told you about the little lunchroom where the readers from the library get their noonday feed. Well, a day or so ago I was sitting at the next table to her, and when she'd finished eating and felt for her purse, I saw her get pale, and I knew right off she'd lost her money. 'If you'll excuse me, Miss Midland,' I said, 'I'll be glad to loan you a little. My name is Harrison, Peter Harrison, and I usually sit next you in the reading-room.' Say, Maggie, you don't know how queerly she looked at me. I can't tell you what her expression was like, for I couldn't make head or tail out of it. It was like looking at a Hebrew book that you don't know whether to read backward or forward. She got whiter, and drew away and said something about 'No! No! she couldn't think——' But there stood the waiter with his hand out. I couldn't stop to figure out if she was mad or scared. I said 'Look-y-here, Miss Midland, I'm an American—here's my card—I just want to help you out, that's all. You needn't be afraid I'll bother you any.' And with that I asked the waiter how much it was, paid him, and went out for my usual half-hour constitutional in the little park opposite the library.
"When I went back to the reading-room, she was there in the seat next me, all right, but my, wasn't she buried in a big folio! She's studying in some kind of old music-books. You would have laughed to see how she didn't know I existed. I forgot all about her till closing-up time, but when I got out in the court a little ahead of her, I found it was raining and blowing to beat the cars, and I went back to hunt her up, I being the only person that knew she was broke. There she was, moping around in the vestibule under one of those awful pancake hats English women wear. I took out six cents—it costs that to ride in the omnibuses here—and I marched up to her. 'Miss Midland,' I said, 'excuse me again, but the weather is something terrible. You can't refuse to let me loan you enough to get home in a 'bus, for you would certainly catch your death of cold, not to speak of spoiling your clothes, if you tried to walk in this storm.'
"She looked at me queerly again, drew in her chin, and said very fierce, 'No, certainly not! Some one always comes to fetch me away.'
"Of course I didn't believe a word of that! It was just a bluff to keep from seeming to need anything. So I smiled at her and said, 'That's all right, but suppose something happens this evening so he doesn't get here. I guess you'd better take the six sous—they won't hurt you any.' And I took hold of her hand, put the coppers in it, shut her fingers, took off my hat, and skipped out before she could get her breath. There are a few times when women are so contrary you can't do the right thing by them without bossing them around a little.
"Well, I thought sure if she'd been mad at noon she'd just be hopping mad over that last, but the next morning she came up to me in the vestibule and smiled at me, the funniest little wavery smile, as though she were trying on a brand-new expression. It made her look almost pretty. 'Good morning, Mr. Harrison,' she said in that soft, singsong tone English women have, 'here is your loan back again. I hope I have the sum you paid for my lunch correct—and thank you very much.'
"I hated to take her little money, for her clothes are awfully plain and don't look as though she had any too much cash, but of course I did, and even told her that I'd given the waiter a three-cent tip she'd forgotten to figure in. When you can, I think it's only the square thing to treat women like human beings with sense, and I knew how I'd feel about being sure I'd returned all of a loan from a stranger. 'Oh, thank you for telling me,' she said, and took three more coppers out of her little purse; and by gracious! we walked into the reading-room as friendly as could be.