"Ah," said the young man, "how often one gets to the verge of a confession and then shirks it! Believe me, it is not an easy story for me to tell. Perhaps even it would be better for me to bear my burden alone."
"Very well. And those poems that you have written--you wished to show them to me, to get my opinion and see if I could help you towards publication."
"My fatal shyness! You, a writer yourself, must know what that is!" He felt that he was quite lost, and that the girl was getting angry, and he wished he could think of some way out of it.
"So I am not to have your verses or your story. But I think I will trouble you to hear a little of my story. You are not Samuel Pepper. With my experience of story-writing I ought to have seen that that was a make-up name, to suit the part of a solicitor's clerk. There is no Samuel Pepper. Your letters then were not genuine. They were very well done; as an artist I congratulate you. The thing that puzzles me is that you could not keep it up better when you had trapped me into meeting you. You cannot act a bit. You have not even dressed the part. You have not even taken the trouble to put a few verses in manuscript in your pocket. I will tell you why you succeeded in deceiving me in your letters. I live with my family, and I write stories and verses. I know they are not very good, but the money that I get for them is a consideration, and I hope with practice to do better. You touched my vanity, it is not often that anybody takes any notice of my work. And you appealed to my compassion. That part of your letter where you spoke of your loneliness among the people at the boarding-house seemed to me to be quite simple and unaffected. It made some impression on me. I was interested in what you said about your writing, and I remembered what a struggle I had at first myself; I thought I could help you. I felt safe because I trusted to your timidity and your sense of the difference between us, so cleverly conveyed in your letters. That was why you were able to trap me; and it will teach me in future not to be vain or kind-hearted. I don't know why you wanted to do it. You have had your joke, perhaps, or you have won your bet. You won't make the mistake of supposing that you have made my acquaintance, or of writing to me again. Now, I am going."