Drawn by Herman Pfeifer. Half-tone plate engraved by H. C. Merrill

“‘SHE WAS THREE AISLES AWAY, LOOKING OVER THAT NEW IMPORTATION OF CHINESE MANDARINS’”

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During the considerable period that Mr. Francis had rented Mrs. Benson’s most expensive room, the second-floor front, his intimacy with her had consisted of one heart-to-heart talk in the week following Mr. Benson’s decease. Mr. Benson, who had been indefinitely “in the clothing business,” had caught a cold which developed into pneumonia, with fatal results. When, a few days after the funeral, Mrs. Benson wept on Mr. Francis’s shoulder, she had said that she wished never to speak to another man, never even to see one, except in the necessary course of business. She ran a boarding-house, and she would accept men as well as women for boarders; other relations with them she could not consider.

Mr. Francis had always respected her wishes. Even when she presided at the Sunday evening dinner-table, a wide, tight vision of black silk, and conversation was supposed to be more unrestricted than on week-days, Mr. Francis had been careful not to trespass on the sacred confines of her bereavement. Her conversation with the other men at the table, in which she attempted to include him, he passed off as her necessary sacrifice to the business that supported her widowhood. He was even more literal-minded than the average idealist.

On Thursday, April 21, he wrote in the book:

“I am quite sure she was in again to-day. She was three aisles away, looking over that new importation of Chinese mandarins, but she departed before I approached. She was dressed altogether different from the first two times, but I am sure it was she. I would notice her face among a thousand. I noticed those two little lines at the top of her nose between her eyebrows. And yet she is not old; one would not call her young, either; and not middle-aged, either. Before I got over wondering whether I should go over and wait on her personally, she had gone. He who hesitates is lost. The clerk said she had taken samples of all the new silks. He thought she had taken too many, and said she did not act like a buyer. I requested him to follow McDavitt’s principle to give all the samples asked for and not comment on it.

“To be much of my time in the office, as my new position forces me to be, has some drawbacks. Doubtless, however, even were I back in my old place, I should never see her again. And what possible good can come if I do see her? I am little more than a servant, a lackey. But I forget that I am now an assistant buyer. Perhaps that raises me a little in the scale. But how little—not enough to make any difference to her.

“From the library to-day I got a book, ‘Selections from the English Poets of the Nineteenth Century.’ It is more complete than the ‘Golden Treasury,’ and I anticipate a great deal of pleasure and profit from it. It contains Shelley’s ‘Defense of Poetry,’ which I can well afford to read again.”