ion which one feels in recounting the charms of a new friend.
He was thinking of some real person. It was someone he had met quite
lately, someone with red hair. He was thinking of that little Ellen
Melville.

He looked across the hall at her. Their eyes met.

IV

When he went over to her side at the end of the meeting she glowered at
him and said, "Oh, it's you!" as if it was the first time she had set
eyes upon him that evening; but he knew that that was just because she
was shy, and he shook hands rather slowly and looked her full in the
face as he said he had liked the speeches so that she might see she
couldn't come it over _him_. And he asked if he might see her home.

She swallowed, and pushed up her chin, as if trying to rise to some
tremendous occasion, and then pulled herself together, and with an air
of having found a loophole of escape, enquired, "But where are you
stopping?" and when he made answer that he was staying at the Caledonian
Hotel, she exclaimed in a tone of relief, "Ah, but I live at Hume Park
Square out by the Meadows!"

"I want to see you home," he said inflexibly.

"Oh, if you want the walk!" she answered resignedly. "Though you've a
queer taste in walks, for the streets are terrible underfoot. But I
suppose you're shut up all day at your work. You'll just have to sit
down and wait till I've checked the literature and handed in the
takings. I doubt yon stout body in plum-coloured velveteen who bought
R.J. Campbell on the Social Evil with such an air of condescension has
paid me with a bad threepenny-bit. Aren't folks the limit?" She was so
full of bitterness against the fraudulent body in plum-coloured
velveteen that she forgot her shyness and looked into his eyes to appeal
for sympathy. "Ah, well!" she said, stiffening again, "I'll be back in a
minute."

He leaned against a pillar and waited. The hall became empty, became
melancholy; mysteriously and insultingly its emptiness seemed to
summarise the proceedings that had just ended. It was as if the place
were waiting till he and the few darkly dressed women who still stood
about chewing the speeches were gone, and would then enact a satire on
the evening; the rows of seats which turned their polished brown
surfaces towards the platform with an effect of mock attentiveness would
jeeringly imitate the audience, the chairs that had been left
higgledy-piggledy on the platform would parody the speakers. And
doubtless, if there is a ben