ess gave her a starkness....

I do remember, though, how one afternoon I discovered the peculiar
appeal of her form for me. I had been restless with my work and had
finally slipped out of the Laboratory and come over to the Art Museum
to lounge among the pictures. I came upon her in an odd corner of the
Sheepshanks gallery, intently copying something from a picture that hung
high. I had just been in the gallery of casts from the antique, my mind
was all alive with my newly awakened sense of line, and there she stood
with face upturned, her body drooping forward from the hips just a
little--memorably graceful--feminine.

After that I know I sought to see her, felt a distinctive emotion at
her presence, began to imagine things about her. I no longer thought
of generalised womanhood or of this casual person or that. I thought of
her.

An accident brought us together. I found myself one Monday morning in an
omnibus staggering westward from Victoria--I was returning from a Sunday
I'd spent at Wimblehurst in response to a unique freak of hospitality
on the part of Mr. Mantell. She was the sole other inside passenger.
And when the time came to pay her fare, she became an extremely scared,
disconcerted and fumbling young woman; she had left her purse at home.

Luckily I had some money.

She looked at me with startled, troubled brown eyes; she permitted my
proffered payment to the conductor with a certain ungraciousness that
seemed a part of her shyness, and then as she rose to go, she thanked me
with an obvious affectation of ease.

"Thank you so much," she said in a pleasant soft voice; and then less
gracefully, "Awfully kind of you, you know."

I fancy I made polite noises. But just then I wasn't disposed to be
critical. I was full of the sense of her presence; her arm was stretched
out over me as she moved past me, the gracious slenderness of her body
was near me. The words we used didn't seem very greatly to matter. I had
vague ideas of getting out with her--and I didn't.

That encounter, I have no doubt, exercised me enormously. I lay awake
at night rehearsing it, and wondering about the next phase of our
relationship. That took the form of the return of my twopence. I was
in the Science Library, digging something out of the Encyclopedia
Britannica, when she appeared beside me and placed on the open page an
evidently premeditated thin envelope, bulgingly confessing the coins
within.

"It was so very kind of you,