There was something friendly and adventurous in her manner; she conveyed she liked me, and when presently Willersley drifted off to write letters our talk sank at once to easy confidential undertones. I felt enterprising, and indeed it is easy to be daring with people one has never seen before and may never see again. I said I loved beautiful scenery and all beautiful things, and the pointing note in my voice made her laugh. She told me I had bold eyes, and so far as I can remember I said she made them bold. “Blue they are,” she remarked, smiling archly. “I like blue eyes.” Then I think we compared ages, and she said she was the Woman of Thirty, “George Moore's Woman of Thirty.” I had not read George Moore at the time, but I pretended to understand. That, I think, was our limit that evening. She went to bed, smiling good-night quite prettily down the big staircase, and I and Willersley went out to smoke in the garden. My head was full of her, and I found it necessary to talk about her. So I made her a problem in sociology. “Who the deuce are these people?” I said, “and how do they get a living? They seem to have plenty of money. He strikes me as being--Willersley, what is a drysalter? I think he's a retired drysalter.” Willersley theorised while I thought of the woman and that provocative quality of dash she had displayed. The next day at lunch she and I met like old friends. A huge mass of private thinking during the interval had been added to our effect upon one another. We talked for a time of insignificant things. “What do you do,” she asked rather quickly, “after lunch? Take a siesta?” “Sometimes,” I said, and hung for a moment eye to eye. We hadn't a doubt of each other, but my heart was beating like a steamer propeller when it lifts out of the water. “Do you get a view from your room?” she asked after a pause. “It's on the third floor, Number seventeen, near the staircase. My friend's next door.” She began to talk of books. She was interested in Christian Science, she said, and spoke of a book. I forget altogether what that book was called, though I remember to this day with the utmost exactness the purplish magenta of its cover. She said she would lend it to me and hesitated. Willersley wanted to go for an expedition across the lake that afternoon, but I refused. He made some other proposals that I rejected abruptly. “I shall write in my room,” I said. “Why not write down here?” “I shall write in my room,” I snarled like a thwarted animal, and he looked at me curiously. “Very well,” he said; “then I'll make some notes and think about that order of ours out under the magnolias.” I hovered about the lounge for a time buying postcards and feverishly restless, watching the movements of the other people. Finally I went up to my room and sat down by the windows, staring out. There came a little tap at the unlocked door and in an instant, like the go of a taut bowstring, I was up and had it open.