Mr. Brumley.

Sec.4

That evening Mr. Brumley was quite unable to work. His mind was full of
this beautiful dark lady who had come so unexpectedly into his world.

Perhaps there are such things as premonitions. At any rate he had an
altogether disproportionate sense of the significance of the afternoon's
adventure,--which after all was a very small adventure indeed. A mere
talk. His mind refused to leave her, her black furry slenderness, her
dark trustful eyes, the sweet firmness of her perfect lips, her
appealing simplicity that was yet somehow compatible with the completest
self-possession. He went over the incident of the board again and again,
scraping his memory for any lurking crumb of detail as a starving man
might scrape an insufficient plate. Her dignity, her gracious frank
forgiveness; no queen alive in these days could have touched her.... But
it wasn't a mere elaborate admiration. There was something about her,
about the quality of their meeting.

Most people know that sort of intimation. This person, it says, so fine,
so brave, so distant still in so many splendid and impressive
qualities, is yet in ways as yet undefined and unexplored, subtly and
abundantly--for _you_. It was that made all her novelty and distinction
and high quality and beauty so dominating among Mr. Brumley's thoughts.
Without that his interest might have been almost entirely--academic. But
there was woven all through her the hints of an imaginable alliance,
with _us_, with the things that are Brumley, with all that makes
beautiful little cottages and resents advertisements in lovely places,
with us as against something over there lurking behind that board,
something else, something out of which she came. He vaguely adumbrated
what it was out of which she came. A closed narrow life--with horrid
vast enviable quantities of money. A life, could one use the word
_vulgar_?--so that Carpaccio, Della Robbia, old furniture, a garden
unostentatiously perfect, and the atmosphere of _belles-lettres_, seemed
things of another more desirable world. (She had never been abroad.) A
world, too, that would be so willing, so happy to enfold her, furs,
funds, freshness--everything.

And all this was somehow animated by the stirring warmth in the June
weather, for spring raised the sap in Mr. Brumley as well as in his
trees, had been a restless time for him all his life. This spring
particularly had sensitized him, and now a light had shone.

He wa