Life seemed, just then, a rather miserable affair. Her ambition was balked by her slowness in learning, and she began to think that she would never be able to do better than she was doing with Miss Eppendorfer. A filler of odd jobs, employed principally because she was personally agreeable.... And, somehow, Miss Eppendorfer’s talk of love made her lonely and sad. She thought of her twenty-three years, and was terrified by the fear that she would never be loved. She longed so to be loved! What chance, though? She went from Miss Eppendorfer’s flat, which no man entered but “Kurtie,” to the night school, where the oldest male was perhaps nineteen. A situation ripe for the coming of the hero. As usual he came. Or perhaps, the one who came had to be he.... It was the end of June, and after two months of effort, Frankie still sat among the beginners. She had developed a new trouble. She was able now to scratch desperately while the teacher dictated, almost keeping pace with her, but she could never afterward read what she had written. She was trying in vain to type a letter she had taken down, in which all she could distinguish was “Dear Sir:” and the “14th inst.” when she heard someone sit down in the seat next her, which had till then been vacant. Naturally she glanced up. It was, as she later wrote to Minnie, a “real grown-up human being,” a tall, thin fellow with a haughty, stupid face, a man who couldn’t be under thirty and who was dressed in well-fitting and expensive clothes. She couldn’t help staring at him, all the more because he took no notice of her at all. “He was so out of place there,” she wrote. “He was so well-bred, with the nicest thin brown hands. And, my dear Minnie, he was even stupider than me. Much stupider.” She watched him a great deal, as he tried to write on his machine. The keyboard was hidden with a tin cover, so that he was obliged to learn the letters by memory; this puzzled and annoyed him, and he frowned severely over his chart. “I say!” he said, suddenly, to Frances, with a marked English accent, “Isn’t there something wrong about this thing? B ought to come next to A.” She explained that the keyboard wasn’t arranged alphabetically. He asked why not, and she said she didn’t know. “Some American idea, I suppose,” he observed, with displeasure, and turned away to resume his struggle. He was not polite, he was certainly not clever, and, in spite of limpid and innocent grey eyes, not handsome; his nose was too large, his expression too contemptuous. Why then should Frances think him so terribly appealing and attractive? She felt an exaggerated good-will toward him, an ardent wish to help him, even to comfort him. There was no obvious reason for this painful compassion; he was well-dressed, showed not the least trace of poverty, quite the contrary. He looked healthy too, although very thin. And he had very much the air of being satisfied with himself. Ridiculous girl!