“When he came in to breakfast, the third morning, prepared with an excuse for cutting his week down to the dimensions it had reached, he saw her sitting alone at the table. She had risen early as a consequence of having arrived late the night before; and when Braybridge found himself in for it, he forgot that he meant to go away, and said good-morning, as if they knew each other. Their hostess found them talking over the length of the table in a sort of mutual fright, and introduced them. But it’s rather difficult reporting a lady verbatim at second hand. I really had the facts from Welkin, who had them from his wife. The sum of her impressions was that Braybridge and Miss Hazelwood were getting a kind of comfort out of their mutual terror because one was as badly frightened as the other. It was a novel experience for both. Ever seen her?”
We looked at one another. Minver said: “I never wanted to paint any one so much. It was at the spring show of the American Artists. There was a jam of people; but this girl—I’ve understood it was she—looked as much alone as if there were nobody else there. She might have been a startled doe in the North Woods suddenly coming out on a twenty-thousand-dollar camp, with a lot of twenty-million-dollar people on the veranda.”
“And you wanted to do her as The Startled Doe,” I said. “Good selling name.”
“Don’t reduce it to the vulgarity of fiction. I admit it would be a selling name.”
“Go on, Wanhope,” Rulledge puffed impatiently. “Though I don’t see how there could be another soul in the universe as constitutionally scared of men as Braybridge is of women.”
“In the universe nothing is wasted, I suppose. Everything has its complement, its response. For every bashful man, there must be a bashful woman,” Wanhope returned.
“Or a bold one,” Minver suggested.
“No; the response must be in kind to be truly complemental. Through the sense of their reciprocal timidity they divine that they needn’t be afraid.”
“Oh! That’s the way you get out of it!”
“Well?” Rulledge urged.