t small hands!
Certainly here was a peculiarity that persisted. No--absurd though it
seemed, no! One way he looked at those hands, they were broad and
strong, another way narrow and gracefully weak.

He said to himself: "The man who gets that girl will have Solomon's
wives rolled into one. A harem at the price of a wife--or a--" He left
the thought unfinished. It seemed an insult to this helpless little
creature, the more rather than the less cowardly for being unspoken;
for, no doubt her ideas of propriety were firmly conventional.

"About done?" he asked impatiently.

She glanced up. "In a moment. I'm sorry to be so slow."

"You're not," he assured her truthfully. "It's my impatience. Let me see
the pages you've finished."

With them he was able to concentrate his mind. When she laid the last
page beside his arm he was absorbed, did not look at her, did not think
of her. "Take the machine away," said he abruptly.

He was leaving for the day when he remembered her again. He sent for
her. "I forgot to thank you. It was good work. You will do well. All you
need is practice--and confidence. Especially confidence." He looked at
her. She seemed frail--touchingly frail. "You are not strong?"

She smiled, and in an instant the frailty seemed to have been mere
delicacy of build--the delicacy that goes with the strength of steel
wires, or rather of the spider's weaving thread which sustains weights
and shocks out of all proportion to its appearance. "I've never been ill
in my life," said she. "Not a day."

Again, because she was standing before him in full view, he noted the
peculiar construction of her frame--the beautiful lines of length so
dextrously combined that her figure as a whole was not tall. He said, "A
working woman--or man--needs health above all. Thank you again." And he
nodded a somewhat curt dismissal. When she glided away and he was alone
behind the closed door, he reflected for a moment upon the extraordinary
amount of thinking--and the extraordinary kind of thinking--into which
this poor little typewriter girl had beguiled him. He soon found the
explanation for this vagary into a realm so foreign to a man of his high
tastes and ambitions. "It's because I'm so in love with Josephine," he
decided. "I've fallen into the sentimental state of all lovers. The
whole sex becomes novel and interesting and worth while."

As he left the office, unusually late, he saw her still at work--no
doubt doing over agai