s. And then after that I went to Persia. I
know it sounds silly, but it seemed to me as though just the smell of
Persia would be able to drive away even the memory of red plush dust
and scorching woodwork. And there was a man on the steamer whom I used
to know at home--a man who's almost always wanted to marry me. And
there was a man who joined our party at Teheran--who liked me a
little. And the land was like silk and silver and attar of roses. But
all the time I couldn't seem to think about anything except how
perfectly awful it was that a _stranger_ like me should be running
round loose in the world, carrying all the big, scary secrets of a man
who didn't even know where I was. And then it came to me all of a
sudden, one rather worrisome day, that no woman who knew as much about
a man as I did was exactly a 'stranger' to him. And then, twice as
suddenly, to great, grown-up, cool-blooded, money-staled, book-tamed
_me_--it swept over me like a cyclone that I should never be able to
decide anything more in all my life--not the width of a tinsel ribbon,
not the goal of a journey, not the worth of a lover--until I'd seen
the Face that belonged to the Voice in the railroad wreck.

"And I sat down--and wrote the man a letter--I had his name and
address, you know. And there--in a rather maddening moonlight night on
the Caspian Sea--all the horrors and terrors of that other--Canadian
night came back to me and swamped completely all the arid timidity
and sleek conventionality that women like me are hidebound with
all their lives, and I wrote him--that unknown, unvisualized,
unimagined--MAN--the utterly free, utterly frank, utterly
honest sort of letter that any brave soul would write any other brave
soul--every day of the world--if there wasn't any flesh. It wasn't a
love letter. It wasn't even a sentimental letter. Never mind what I
told him. Never mind anything except that there, in that tropical
night on a moonlit sea, I asked him to meet me here, in Boston, eight
months afterward--on the same Boston-bound Canadian train--on
this--the anniversary of our other tragic meeting."

"And you think he'll be at the station?" gasped the Traveling
Salesman.

The Youngish Girl's answer was astonishingly tranquil. "I don't know,
I'm sure," she said. "That part of it isn't my business. All I know is
that I wrote the letter--and mailed it. It's Fate's move next."

"But maybe he never got the letter!" protested the Traveling
Salesman