"I cannot read," he said, without shame, "or write--at least I cannot write words. Figures, yes, figures are easy; somebody told me--he was a professor of English I think, at one of the universities--that it was astonishing that I could work out mathematical problems and employ all the signs and symbols of trigonometry and algebra without being able to write. I wish I could read. When I pass a bookshop I feel like an armless man who is starving within hands' reach of salvation. I know a great deal and I pay a man to read to me--Livy and Prescott and Green, and, of course, Bacon--I know them all. Writing does not worry me--I have no friends." If he had spoken apologetically, if he had displayed the least aggression, she might have classified, and held him in a place. But he spoke of his shortcomings as he might have spoken of his gray hair, as a phenomenon beyond his ordering. She was thunderstruck; possibly he was so used to shocking people from this cause that he did not appear to observe the effect he had produced. He was so completely content with this, the first contact with his dream woman, that he was almost incapable of receiving any other impression. Her hair was fairer than he had thought, the nose thinner, the molding of her delicate face more spirituel. The lips redder and fuller, the rounded chin less firm. And the eyes--he wished she would turn her head so that he could be sure of their color. They were big, set wide apart, there was depth in them and a something upon which he yearned. The figure of her he knew by heart. Straight and tall and most gracious. A patrician; he thought of her as that. And oriental. He had pictured her as a great lady at Constantine's court; he set her upon the marble terrace of a decent villa on the hills above the Chrysopolis; a woman of an illustrious order. She could never suspect that he thought of her at all as a distinct personality. She could not guess that he knew her as well as his own right hand; that, day after day, he had waited in the Row, a shabby and inconspicuous figure amongst the smart loungers: waited for the benison of her presence. She had not seen him in Devon in the spring--he had been there. Lying on the rain-soaked grass of Tapper Downs to watch her walking with her father; sitting amidst gorse on the steep slope of the cliff, she unconscious of his guardianship, reading in her chair on the smooth beach. "How curious, I nearly said 'sad'. But you do not feel very sad about it, Mr. Sault, do you?" Amused, he shook his head. "It would be irritating," he said, "if I were sorry for myself. But I am never that. Half the unhappiness of life comes from the vanity of self-pity. It is the mother of all bitterness. Do you realize that? You cannot feel bitter without feeling sorry for yourself." She nodded. "You miss a great deal--but you know that--poetry. I suppose you have that read to you?" Ambrose Sault laughed softly. "Yes--poetry.