The Project Gutenberg EBook of We Two, by Edna Lyall

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Title: We Two

Author: Edna Lyall

Posting Date: November 23, 2008 [EBook #2007]
Release Date: December, 1999

Language: English

Character set encoding: ASCII

*** START OF THIS PROJECT GUTENBERG EBOOK WE TWO ***

Produced by Theresa Armao

WE TWO

By Edna Lyall

CHAPTER I. Brian Falls in Love

Still humanity grows dearer,
Being learned the more. Jean Ingelow.

There are three things in this world which deserve no
quarter--Hypocrisy, Pharisaism, and Tyranny. F. Robertson

People who have been brought up in the country, or in small places where
every neighbor is known by sight, are apt to think that life in a large
town must lack many of the interests which they have learned to find in
their more limited communities. In a somewhat bewildered way, they gaze
at the shifting crowd of strange faces, and wonder whether it would be
possible to feel completely at home where all the surroundings of life
seem ever changing and unfamiliar.

But those who have lived long in one quarter of London, or of any other
large town, know that there are in reality almost as many links between
the actors of the town life-drama as between those of the country
life-drama.

Silent recognitions pass between passengers who meet day after day in
the same morning or evening train, on the way to or from work; the faces
of omnibus conductors grow familiar; we learn to know perfectly well on
what day of the week and at what hour the well-known organ-grinder will
make his appearance, and in what street we shall meet the city clerk or
the care-worn little daily governess on their way to office or school.
It so happened that Brian Osmond, a young doctor who had not been very
long settled in the Bloomsbury regions, had an engagement which took
him every afternoon down Gower Street, and here many faces had grown
familiar to him. He invariably met the same sallow-faced postman, the
same nasal-voiced milkman, the same pompous-looking man with the bushy
whiskers and the shiny black bag, on his way home from the city. But the
only passenger in whom he took any interest was a certain bright-faced