He was unable to place her exactly. She was not a typist. She seemed too educated to be a governess. It was even more certain that she was not a fashionable London woman. She might possibly be a student of one of the arts. She was a little imperious in her way, yet she had the kindest and friendliest eyes. She was transparently good, and he guessed that unconventionality was unusual with her. She had not spoiled its effect for herself by making it commonplace. And who on earth was this solicitor's clerk whom this charming person had meant to meet, and why had she been going to meet him? It occurred to the young man that he would like to wring the neck of that clerk (whom he was at present fraudulently under-studying) for his infernal impertinence.
"Now," said the girl, "I want you to tell me why you wrote in the first instance?"
This was a facer. He chanced it. "But I think you know," he said; and it turned out very well.
"Yes, I do, more or less. I know you read my verses, and that you then wrote to me at the office of the paper and said the kindest things."
The young man shook his head. "They were less than the truth," he said.
"But, after all, the idea in the verses--the kindred souls that Fate keeps strangers to each other--that's not a new idea. You must have seen something of the kind scores of times before."
"If I had seen it before I did not remember it. I certainly had not seen it treated in that way. Your poem seemed to come to me like a message." This for a young man who had not read one word of the poem was distinctly good--or, if you prefer it, distinctly bad.
"Well, when you wrote the first letter had you any idea of writing the second, the one in which you asked me to meet you?"
"I had to see how you would take it. I know it was great presumption on my part to hope for anything of the kind; it was most good of you to come."
"I wondered how long it would be before you thanked me."
"A thousand pardons. I see little society, of course. I am shy and awkward. I never say the right thing."
"But you are not shy and awkward. You are not at all what I expected. I have your second letter here. Listen. I leave out the part where you speak of your loneliness."
"There are few lives," said the young man, sorrowfully, "more solitary than that of a solicitor's clerk. You don't know." Nor, for that matter, did he.