One day, she had been there about two months, she said something to him about it. It was hard; it seemed forcing one's way into a room that had never been opened to one--there were several doors he kept closed. “Mr. Clifford,” she turned to him impetuously as they were putting away their things that night, “will you mind if I say something to you?” He was covering his paste-pot. He looked up at her strangely. The closed door seemed to open a little way. “I can't conceive of 'minding' anything you might say to me, Miss Noah,”--he had called her Miss Noah ever since she, by mistake, had one day called him Mr. Webster. “You see,” she hurried on, very timid, now that the door had opened a little, “you have been so good to me. Because you have been so good to me it seems that I have some right to--to--” His head was resting upon his hand, and he leaned a little closer as though listening for something he wanted to hear. “I had a cousin who had a cough like yours,”--brave now that she could not go back--“and he went down to New Mexico and stayed for a year, and when he came back--when he came back he was as well as any of us. It seems so foolish not to”--her voice broke, now that it had so valiantly carried it--“not to--” He looked at her, and that was all. But she was never wholly the same again after that look. It enveloped her being in a something which left her richer--different. It was a look to light the dark place between two human souls. It seemed for the moment that words would follow it, but as if feeling their helplessness--perhaps needlessness--they sank back unuttered, and at the last he got up, abruptly, and walked away. One night, while waiting for the elevator, she heard two of the men talking about him. When she went out on the street it was with head high, cheeks hot. For nothing is so hard to hear as that which one has half known, and evaded. One never denies so hotly as in denying to one's self what one fears is true, and one never resents so bitterly as in resenting that which one cannot say one has the right to resent. That night she lay in her bed with wide open eyes, going over and over the things they had said. “_Cure?_”--one of them had scoffed, after telling how brilliant he had been before he “went to pieces”--“why all the cures on earth couldn't help him! He can go just so far, and then he can no more stop himself--oh, about as much as an ant could stop a prairie fire!” She finally turned over on her pillow and sobbed; and she wondered why--wondered, yet knew. But it resulted in the flowering of her tenderness for him. Interest mounted to defiance. It ended in blind, passionate desire to “make it up” to him. And again he was so different from Harold; Harold did not impress himself upon one by upsetting all one's preconceived ideas. She felt now that she understood better--understood the closed doors. He was--she could think of no better word than sensitive.