high up to see his face.
He always wore a light-coloured tweed suit, and a knitted tie of about
ten different colours, and his aquiline nose and jaunty manner gave him
an air of knowingness which she much appreciated. He was a stockkeeper
in a publishing house, and came from the South of England. His voice was
light in tone, and he had a delightful burr. This young man, Harry
Simmons, became her friend and soon walked part of the way home with her
after each lesson. He talked politics to her, and explained all sorts of
things which she had never before known. He told her how books were
made, and how they were delivered unbound in great bales; and when she
said "a book" meaning "a paper," he corrected her. Sally liked him. Of
the three men she now knew well he was the best-informed. Accordingly
she learnt more, intellectually, from him than from either of the
others. He quickly fell in love with her, which was an added pleasure;
and she once or twice let him kiss her, without promising anything or
revealing the existence of Toby. She never kissed Harry in return, a
fact which she cherished as a proof of her innocence. But she liked him
very much, and told him more about herself than she had ever told
anybody else. And as there is nothing like the use of such care and such
flexible and uncertain kindness, when it is not calculated, for
tantalising a young man who is agreeably in love with a young girl,
Sally had a new delight, a new self-flattery, to cosset. The affair did
not become very desperate in Harry's case--he was too conceited, and he
knew the rules of the game too well--and at length it subsided normally;
but it lasted pleasantly and instructively enough for perhaps four
months, and the memory for both was one of smiling amusement,
untempered by chagrin. Sally's one dread in the whole course of her
friendship with Harry was a dread lest Toby should see them together.
That Harry should see her with Toby she did not mind, because she could
at any time have relinquished Harry without a qualm; but she loved Toby,
and took care to keep secret from him on their infrequent meetings
anything which might disturb his ardent thoughts of the little girl he
had left at home.

So book-keeping went on. And so Harry went on. But by now Sally's
interests had become many, for she was leading a busy life, and the
difficulty of maintaining all her affairs at the necessary pitch of
freshness and importance in her attention was incr