His taste in reading was another matter. The novels and romances he had devoured during certain periods of his teens had mostly come from the Sunbury Free Public Library. Lately, however, apart from thrilling moments with The Prisoner of Zenda, Under the Red Rose, and The Princess Aline, he had found difficulty in reading at all. Something was stirring within him, something restlessly positive, an impulse to give out rather than take in. Though he had, at intervals, lunged with determination at the Green and the Boswell. This effort, indeed, had been repeated so many times that he occasionally caught himself speaking of these authors as if he had read them exhaustively. The bottom drawer of the bureau was a third full of unfinished manuscripts--attempts at novels, short stories, poems, plays--each faithfully reflecting its immediate source of inspiration. There were paragraphs that might have been written by a little Dickens; there were thinly diluted specimens of Dumas, Oliver Wendell Holmes, Richard Harding Davis, Thackeray. The rest was all Kipling, prose and verse. Everybody was writing Kipling then. A step sounded in the hall. The knob turned softly; the door opened a little way; and the thinnish, moderately pretty face of Mamie Wilcox appeared--pale blue eyes with the beginnings of hollows beneath them, fair skin, straight hay-coloured hair, wisps of it straying down across forehead and cheek, thin nose, soft but rather sulky mouth. She was probably twenty-two or twenty-three at this time. All she said was, 'Oh!'--very low. 'Wonder you wouldn't knock!' said he. 'Wonder you wouldn't get up before noon!' she responded smartly, but still in that cautious voice; then added, 'Here, I'll leave the towels, and come back.' And she slipped into the room, a heavier and more shapely figure of a girl than was suggested by the face, a girl in a full-length gingham apron and little shoes with unexpectedly high heels; not 'French' heels, but the sloping style known then as 'military.' 2 Henry's colour was rising a little. He cleared his throat, and said, mumbling, 'Leave anything you like.' 'I'll do just that,'--she turned, with a flirt of her apron and stood, between washstand and door, surveying him--'what I like, and nothing more.'... Her eyes wandered now from him to the picture at the left of the pincushion, then to the snapshots on the wall, and she smiled, very self-contained, very knowing, with the expression that the young call 'sarcastic.' The adjective came to mind. Henry's colour was mounting higher. 'Pretty snappy to-day, ain't we?' said he. 'Yes, when we're snapped at,' said she. There was a silence that ran on into seconds and tens of seconds. Then, acting on an impulse of astonishing suddenness, he sprang toward her. With almost equal agility she stepped away. But he caught one hand. She had the door-knob in her other hand. She drew the door open, then, indecisively, pushed it nearly to.