use was? They had to give me a small room on the
roof. It was really a sort of servant's room in less crowded times, I
fancy. A beggar of an Arab used to pray on his rug in front of my
door.... In rummaging about I found this." He held up the blank-book. "I
looked for an address, meaning to post it to its owner but there was no
address and only given names--there's not a surname between these
covers. Some servant must have found it in a vacated room and later left
it in the one to which I had fallen heir. Seems to have been some girl's
desultory but intimate diary. Just an entry now and then, with evidently
long gaps between. You see the first writing is immature, almost
childish--and the last is dated at Cairo."

I nodded my head, but said nothing. He appeared deeply interested but
his simple punctilio required the reinforcement of my approval, before
he could quite clear the skirts of his conscience in the matter of
having sampled its contents.

"You see," he half-apologized, "my first glance was disinterested, I was
merely seeking to identify ownership. But from just a few lines, read in
that fashion, I saw that it was--" his voice became serious, almost
awed--"well that it was rather wonderful. Some girl has been putting her
heart into words here--" he tapped the blank-book--"and she's written a
genuine human document." Again he paused, drumming on the rail with the
fingers of one hand.

"From a half-dozen bits of Chimbote pottery," he reflected, "I can read
a great deal of the habits and life of the Incas. I can restore an
extinct mammal from some fragments of skeleton, but I find it jolly
difficult to understand anything about a woman. If a fellow means to
marry he ought to try to understand. That's why I'd like to have a dip
into this. Do you think I might?"

"Do you think," I countered, smiling, "that you would have the right to
read somebody's unsigned love-letters?" A certain magazine editor had
once witheringly opined that I would never succeed in literature until I
acquired some insight into the feminine riddle. But he had not pointed
me to diaries. He had bluntly advised me to fall in love with a few
variant types.

Until a man had found blond or dark hairs on his coat shoulder, said the
editor, he could not hope to write about heartbeats. If he had found
various kinds, and that often, he could write better.

Young Mansfield was giving my question a graver and more literal
consideration than it merit