" she said, "the other day. I don't know
what I should have done, Mr.--"

I supplied my name. "I knew," I said, "you were a student here."

"Not exactly a student. I--"

"Well, anyhow, I knew you were here frequently. And I'm a student myself
at the Consolidated Technical Schools."

I plunged into autobiography and questionings, and so entangled her in
a conversation that got a quality of intimacy through the fact that,
out of deference to our fellow-readers, we were obliged to speak in
undertones. And I have no doubt that in substance it was singularly
banal. Indeed I have an impression that all our early conversations were
incredibly banal. We met several times in a manner half-accidental, half
furtive and wholly awkward. Mentally I didn't take hold of her. I never
did take hold of her mentally. Her talk, I now know all too clearly, was
shallow, pretentious, evasive. Only--even to this day--I don't remember
it as in any way vulgar. She was, I could see quite clearly, anxious
to overstate or conceal her real social status, a little desirous to
be taken for a student in the art school and a little ashamed that she
wasn't. She came to the museum to "copy things," and this, I gathered,
had something to do with some way of partially earning her living that I
wasn't to inquire into. I told her things about myself, vain things that
I felt might appeal to her, but that I learnt long afterwards made her
think me "conceited." We talked of books, but there she was very much on
her guard and secretive, and rather more freely of pictures. She "liked"
pictures. I think from the outset I appreciated and did not for a moment
resent that hers was a commonplace mind, that she was the unconscious
custodian of something that had gripped my most intimate instinct, that
she embodied the hope of a possibility, was the careless proprietor of a
physical quality that had turned my head like strong wine. I felt I had
to stick to our acquaintance, flat as it was. Presently we should get
through these irrelevant exterior things, and come to the reality of
love beneath.

I saw her in dreams released, as it were, from herself, beautiful,
worshipful, glowing. And sometimes when we were together, we would come
on silences through sheer lack of matter, and then my eyes would feast
on her, and the silence seemed like the drawing back of a curtain--her
superficial self. Odd, I confess. Odd, particularly, the enormous hold
of certain things about he