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+*** Project Gutenberg etext of Passing of the Third Floor Back ***
+By Jerome K. Jerome
+
+Scanned and proofed by Ronald Burkey (rburkey@heads-up.com) and Amy
+Thomte.
+
+Notes on the editing:  Punctuation and hyphenation have been retained
+as in the original, except words broken across lines have been joined.
+Italicized text is delimited by underlines ("_").  A long break
+between paragraphs is represented by "***".
+
+
+PASSING OF THE THIRD FLOOR BACK
+By JEROME K. JEROME
+
+Author of "Paul Kelver," "Three Men in a Boat," etc., etc.
+
+NEW YORK
+DODD, MEAD & COMPANY
+1909
+
+
+COPYRIGHT, 1904, BY JEROME K. JEROME
+COPYRIGHT, 1908, BY DODD, MEAD & COMPANY
+Published, September, 1908
+
+
+PASSING OF THE THIRD FLOOR BACK
+
+The neighbourhood of Bloomsbury Square towards four o'clock of a
+November afternoon is not so crowded as to secure to the stranger, of
+appearance anything out of the common, immunity from observation.
+Tibb's boy, screaming at the top of his voice that _she_ was his
+honey, stopped suddenly, stepped backwards on to the toes of a voluble
+young lady wheeling a perambulator, and remained deaf, apparently, to
+the somewhat personal remarks of the voluble young lady.  Not until he
+had reached the next corner--and then more as a soliloquy than as
+information to the street--did Tibb's boy recover sufficient interest
+in his own affairs to remark that _he_ was her bee.  The voluble young
+lady herself, following some half-a-dozen yards behind, forgot her
+wrongs in contemplation of the stranger's back.  There was this that
+was peculiar about the stranger's back:  that instead of being flat it
+presented a decided curve.  "It ain't a 'ump, and it don't look like
+kervitcher of the spine," observed the voluble young lady to herself.
+"Blimy if I don't believe 'e's taking 'ome 'is washing up his back."
+
+The constable at the corner, trying to seem busy doing nothing,
+noticed the stranger's approach with gathering interest.  "That's an
+odd sort of a walk of yours, young man," thought the constable.  "You
+take care you don't fall down and tumble over yourself."
+
+"Thought he was a young man," murmured the constable, the stranger
+having passed him.  "He had a young face right enough."
+
+The daylight was fading.  The stranger, finding it impossible to read
+the name of the street upon the corner house, turned back.
+
+"Why, 'tis a young man," the constable told himself; "a mere boy."
+
+"I beg your pardon," said the stranger; "but would you mind telling me
+my way to Bloomsbury Square."
+
+"This is Bloomsbury Square," explained the constable; "leastways round
+the corner is.  What number might you be wanting?"
+
+The stranger took from the ticket pocket of his tightly buttoned
+overcoat a piece of paper, unfolded it and read it out:  "Mrs.
+Pennycherry.  Number Forty-eight."
+
+"Round to the left," instructed him the constable; "fourth house.
+Been recommended there?"
+
+"By--by a friend," replied the stranger.  "Thank you very much."
+
+"Ah," muttered the constable to himself; "guess you won't be calling
+him that by the end of the week, young--"
+
+"Funny," added the constable, gazing after the retreating figure of
+the stranger.  "Seen plenty of the other sex as looked young behind
+and old in front.  This cove looks young in front and old behind.
+Guess he'll look old all round if he stops long at mother
+Pennycherry's:  stingy old cat."
+
+Constables whose beat included Bloomsbury Square had their reasons for
+not liking Mrs. Pennycherry.  Indeed it might have been difficult to
+discover any human being with reasons for liking that sharp-featured
+lady.  Maybe the keeping of second-rate boarding houses in the
+neighbourhood of Bloomsbury does not tend to develop the virtues of
+generosity and amiability.
+
+Meanwhile the stranger, proceeding npon his way, had rung the bell of
+Number Forty-eight.  Mrs. Pennycherry, peeping from the area and
+catching a glimpse, above the railings, of a handsome if somewhat
+effeminate masculine face, hastened to readjust her widow's cap before
+the looking-glass while directing Mary Jane to show the stranger,
+should he prove a problematical boarder, into the dining-room, and to
+light the gas.
+
+"And don't stop gossiping, and don't you take it upon yourself to
+answer questions.  Say I'll be up in a minute," were Mrs.
+Pennycherry's further instructions, "and mind you hide your hands as
+much as you can."
+
+                                  ***
+                                   
+"What are you grinning at?" demanded Mrs. Pennycherry, a couple of
+minutes later, of the dingy Mary Jane.
+
+"Wasn't grinning," explained the meek Mary Jane, "was only smiling to
+myself."
+
+"What at?"
+
+"Dunno," admitted Mary Jane.  But still she went on smiling.
+
+"What's he like then?" demanded Mrs. Pennycherry.
+
+"'E ain't the usual sort," was Mary Jane's opinion.
+
+"Thank God for that," ejaculated Mrs. Pennycherry piously.
+
+"Says 'e's been recommended, by a friend."
+
+"By whom?"
+
+"By a friend.  'E didn't say no name."  Mrs. Pennycherry pondered.
+"He's not the funny sort, is he?"
+
+Not that sort at all.  Mary Jane was sure of it.
+
+Mrs. Pennycherry ascended the stairs still pondering.  As she entered
+the room the stranger rose and bowed.  Nothing could have been simpler
+than the stranger's bow, yet there came with it to Mrs. Pennycherry a
+rush of old sensations long forgotten.  For one brief moment Mrs.
+Pennycherry saw herself an amiable well-bred lady, widow of a
+solicitor:  a visitor had called to see her.  It was but a momentary
+fancy.  The next instant Reality reasserted itself.  Mrs. Pennycherry,
+a lodging-house keeper, existing precariously upon a daily round of
+petty meannesses, was prepared for contest with a possible new
+boarder, who fortunately looked an inexperienced young gentleman.
+
+"Someone has recommended me to you," began Mrs. Pennycherry; "may I
+ask who?"
+
+But the stranger waved the question aside as immaterial.
+
+"You might not remember--him," he smiled.  "He thought that I should
+do well to pass the few months I am given--that I have to be in
+London, here.  You can take me in?"
+
+Mrs. Pennycherry thought that she would be able to take the stranger
+in.
+
+"A room to sleep in," explained the stranger, "--any room will
+do--with food and drink sufficient for a man, is all that I require."
+
+"For breakfast," began Mrs. Pennycherry, "I always give--"
+
+"What is right and proper, I am convinced," interrupted the stranger.
+"Pray do not trouble to go into detail, Mrs. Pennycherry.  With
+whatever it is I shall be content."
+
+Mrs. Pennycherry, puzzled, shot a quick glance at the stranger, but
+his face, though the gentle eyes were smiling, was frank and serious.
+
+"At all events you will see the room," suggested Mrs. Pennycherry,
+"before we discuss terms."
+
+"Certainly," agreed the stranger.  "I am a little tired and shall be
+glad to rest there."
+
+Mrs. Pennycherry led the way upward; on the landing of the third
+floor, paused a moment undecided, then opened the door of the back
+bedroom.
+
+"It is very comfortable," commented the stranger.
+
+"For this room," stated Mrs. Pennycherry, "together with full board,
+consisting of--"
+
+"Of everything needful.  It goes without saying," again interrupted
+the stranger with his quiet grave smile.
+
+"I have generally asked," continued Mrs. Pennycherry, "four pounds a
+week.  To you--" Mrs. Pennycherry's voice, unknown to her, took to
+itself the note of aggressive generosity--"seeing you have been
+recommended here, say three pounds ten."
+
+"Dear lady," said the stranger, "that is kind of you.  As you have
+divined, I am not a rich man.  If it be not imposing upon you I accept
+your reduction with gratitude."
+
+Again Mrs. Pennycherry, familiar with the satirical method, shot a
+suspicious glance upon the stranger, but not a line was there, upon
+that smooth fair face, to which a sneer could for a moment have clung.
+Clearly he was as simple as he looked.
+
+"Gas, of course, extra."
+
+"Of course," agreed the Stranger.
+
+"Coals--"
+
+"We shall not quarrel," for a third time the stranger interrupted.
+"You have been very considerate to me as it is.  I feel, Mrs.
+Pennycherry, I can leave myself entirely in your hands."
+
+The stranger appeared anxious to be alone.  Mrs. Pennycherry, having
+put a match to the stranger's fire, turned to depart.  And at this
+point it was that Mrs. Pennycherry, the holder hitherto of an unbroken
+record for sanity, behaved in a manner she herself, five minutes
+earlier in her career, would have deemed impossible--that no living
+soul who had ever known her would have believed, even had Mrs.
+Pennycherry gone down upon her knees and sworn it to them.
+
+"Did I say three pound ten?" demanded Mrs. Pennycherry of the
+stranger, her hand upon the door.  She spoke crossly.  She was feeling
+cross, with the stranger, with herself--particularly with herself.
+
+"You were kind enough to reduce it to that amount," replied the
+stranger; "but if upon reflection you find yourself unable--"
+
+"I was making a mistake," said Mrs. Pennycherry, "it should have been
+two pound ten."
+
+"I cannot--I will not accept such sacrifice," exclaimed the stranger;
+"the three pound ten I can well afford."
+
+"Two pound ten are my terms," snapped Mrs. Pennycherry.  "If you are
+bent on paying more, you can go elsewhere.  You'll find plenty to
+oblige you."
+
+Her vehemence must have impressed the stranger.  "We will not contend
+further," he smiled.  "I was merely afraid that in the goodness of
+your heart--"
+
+"Oh, it isn't as good as all that," growled Mrs. Pennycherry.
+
+"I am not so sure," returned the stranger.  "I am somewhat suspicious
+of you.  But wilful woman must, I suppose, have her way."
+
+The stranger held out his hand, and to Mrs. Pennycherry, at that
+moment, it seemed the most natural thing in the world to take it as if
+it had been the hand of an old friend and to end the interview with a
+pleasant laugh--though laughing was an exercise not often indulged in
+by Mrs. Pennycherry.
+
+Mary Jane was standing by the window, her hands folded in front of
+her, when Mrs. Pennycherry re-entered the kitchen.  By standing close
+to the window one caught a glimpse of the trees in Bloomsbury Square
+and through their bare branches of the sky beyond.
+
+"There's nothing much to do for the next half hour, till Cook comes
+back.  I'll see to the door if you'd like a run out?" suggested Mrs.
+Pennycherry.
+
+"It would be nice," agreed the girl so soon as she had recovered power
+of speech; "it's just the time of day I like."
+
+"Don't be longer than the half hour," added Mrs. Pennycherry.
+
+Forty-eight Bloomsbury Square, assembled after dinner in the
+drawing-room, discussed the stranger with that freedom and frankness
+characteristic of Forty-eight Bloomsbury Square, towards the absent.
+
+"Not what I call a smart young man," was the opinion of Augustus
+Longcord, who was something in the City.
+
+"Thpeaking  for  mythelf,"  commented his partner Isidore, "hav'n'th
+any uthe for the thmart young man.  Too many of him, ath it ith."
+
+"Must be pretty smart if he's one too many for you," laughed his
+partner.
+
+There was this to be said for the repartee of Forty-eight Bloomsbury
+Square:  it was simple of construction and easy of comprehension.
+
+"Well it made me feel good just looking at him," declared Miss Kite,
+the highly coloured.  "It was his clothes, I suppose--made me think of
+Noah and the ark--all that sort of thing."
+
+"It would be clothes that would make you think--if anything," drawled
+the languid Miss Devine.  She was a tall, handsome girl, engaged at
+the moment in futile efforts to recline with elegance and comfort
+combined upon a horsehair sofa.  Miss Kite, by reason of having
+secured the only easy-chair, was unpopular that evening; so that Miss
+Devine's remark received from the rest of the company more approbation
+than perhaps it merited.
+
+"Is that intended to be clever, dear, or only rude?" Miss Kite
+requested to be informed.
+
+"Both," claimed Miss Devine.
+
+"Myself? I must confess," shouted the tall young lady's father,
+commonly called the Colonel, "I found him a fool."
+
+"I noticed you seemed to be getting on very well together," purred his
+wife, a plump, smiling little lady.
+
+"Possibly we were," retorted the Colonel.  "Fate has accustomed me to
+the society of fools."
+
+"Isn't it a pity to start quarrelling immediately after dinner, you
+two," suggested their thoughtful daughter from the sofa, "you'll have
+nothing left to amuse you for the rest of the evening."
+
+"He didn't strike me as a conversationalist," said the lady who was
+cousin to a baronet; "but he did pass the vegetables before he helped
+himself.  A little thing like that shows breeding."
+
+"Or that he didn't know you and thought maybe you'd leave him half a
+spoonful," laughed Augustus the wit.
+
+"What I can't make out about him--" shouted the Colonel.
+
+The stranger entered the room.
+
+The Colonel, securing the evening paper, retired into a corner.  The
+highly coloured Kite, reaching down from the mantelpiece a paper fan,
+held it coyly before her face.  Miss Devine sat upright on the
+horse-hair sofa, and rearranged her skirts.
+
+"Know anything?" demanded Augustus of the stranger, breaking the
+somewhat remarkable silence.
+
+The stranger evidently did not understand.  It was necessary for
+Augustus, the witty, to advance further into that odd silence.
+
+"What's going to pull off the Lincoln handicap?  Tell me, and I'll go
+out straight and put my shirt upon it."
+
+"I think you would act unwisely," smiled the stranger; "I am not an
+authority upon the subject."
+
+"Not!  Why they told me you were Captain Spy of the _Sporting
+Life_--in disguise."
+
+It would have been difficult for a joke to fall more flat.  Nobody
+laughed, though why Mr. Augustus Longcord could not understand, and
+maybe none of his audience could have told him, for at Forty-eight
+Bloomsbury Square Mr. Augustus Longcord passed as a humorist.  The
+stranger himself appeared unaware that he was being made fun of.
+
+"You have been misinformed," assured him the stranger.
+
+"I beg your pardon," said Mr. Augustus Longcord.
+
+"It is nothing," replied the stranger in his sweet low voice, and
+passed on.
+
+"Well what about this theatre," demanded Mr. Longcord of his friend
+and partner; "do you want to go or don't you?" Mr. Longcord was
+feeling irritable.
+
+"Goth the ticketh--may ath well," thought Isidore.
+
+"Damn stupid piece, I'm told."
+
+"Motht of them thupid, more or leth.  Pity to wathte the ticketh,"
+argued Isidore, and the pair went out.
+
+"Are you staying long in London?" asked Miss Kite, raising her
+practised eyes towards the stranger.
+
+"Not long," answered the stranger.  "At least I do not know.  It
+depends."
+
+An unusual quiet had invaded the drawing-room of Forty-eight
+Bloomsbury Square, generally noisy with strident voices about this
+hour.  The Colonel remained engrossed in his paper.  Mrs. Devine sat
+with her plump white hands folded on her lap, whether asleep or not it
+was impossible to say.  The lady who was cousin to a baronet had
+shifted her chair beneath the gasolier, her eyes bent on her
+everlasting crochet work.  The languid Miss Devine had crossed to the
+piano, where she sat fingering softly the tuneless keys, her back to
+the cold barely-furnished room.
+
+"Sit down!" commanded saucily Miss Kite, indicating with her fan the
+vacant seat beside her.  "Tell me about yourself.  You interest me."
+Miss Kite adopted a pretty authoritative air towards all
+youthful-looking members of the opposite sex.  It harmonised with the
+peach complexion and the golden hair, and fitted her about as well.
+
+"I am glad of that," answered the stranger, taking the chair
+suggested.  "I so wish to interest you."
+
+"You're a very bold boy."  Miss Kite lowered her fan, for the purpose
+of glancing archly over the edge of it, and for the first time
+encountered the eyes of the stranger looking into hers.  And then it
+was that Miss Kite experienced precisely the same curious sensation
+that an hour or so ago had troubled Mrs. Pennycherry when the stranger
+had first bowed to her.  It seemed to Miss Kite that she was no longer
+the Miss Kite that, had she risen and looked into it, the fly-blown
+mirror over the marble mantelpiece would, she knew, have presented to
+her view; but quite another Miss Kite--a cheerful, bright-eyed lady
+verging on middle age, yet still good-looking in spite of her faded
+complexion and somewhat thin brown locks.  Miss Kite felt a pang of
+jealousy shoot through her; this middle-aged Miss Kite seemed, on the
+whole, a more attractive lady.  There was a wholesomeness, a
+broadmindedness about her that instinctively drew one towards her.
+Not hampered, as Miss Kite herself was, by the necessity of appearing
+to be somewhere between eighteen and twenty-two, this other Miss Kite
+could talk sensibly, even brilliantly:  one felt it.  A thoroughly
+"nice" woman this other Miss Kite; the real Miss Kite, though envious,
+was bound to admit it.  Miss Kite wished to goodness she had never
+seen the woman.  The glimpse of her had rendered Miss Kite
+dissatisfied with herself.
+
+"I am not a boy," explained the stranger; "and I had no intention of
+being bold."
+
+"I know," replied Miss Kite.  "It was a silly remark.  Whatever
+induced me to make it, I can't think.  Getting foolish in my old age,
+I suppose."
+
+The stranger laughed.  "Surely you are not old."
+
+"I'm thirty-nine," snapped out Miss Kite.  "You don't call it young?"
+
+"I think it a beautiful age," insisted the stranger; "young enough not
+to have lost the joy of youth, old enough to have learnt sympathy."
+
+"Oh, I daresay," returned Miss Kite, "any age you'd think beautiful.
+I'm going to bed."  Miss Kite rose.  The paper fan had somehow got
+itself broken.  She threw the fragments into the fire.
+
+"It is early yet," pleaded the stranger, "I was looking forward to a
+talk with you."
+
+"Well, you'll be able to look forward to it," retorted Miss Kite.
+"Good-night."
+
+The truth was, Miss Kite was impatient to have a look at herself in
+the glass, in her own room with the door shut.  The vision of that
+other Miss Kite--the clean-looking lady of the pale face and the brown
+hair had been so vivid, Miss Kite wondered whether temporary
+forgetfulness might not have fallen upon her while dressing for dinner
+that evening.
+
+The stranger, left to his own devices, strolled towards the loo table,
+seeking something to read.
+
+"You seem to have frightened away Miss Kite," remarked the lady who
+was cousin to a baronet.
+
+"It seems so," admitted the stranger.
+
+"My cousin, Sir William Bosster," observed the crocheting lady, "who
+married old Lord Egham's niece--you never met the Eghams?"
+
+"Hitherto," replied the stranger, "I have not had that pleasure."
+
+"A charming family.  Cannot understand--my cousin Sir William, I mean,
+cannot understand my remaining here.  'My dear Emily'--he says the
+same thing every time he sees me:  'My dear Emily, how can you exist
+among the sort of people one meets with in a boarding-house.'  But
+they amuse me."
+
+A sense of humour, agreed the stranger, was always of advantage.
+
+"Our family on my mother's side," continued Sir William's cousin in
+her placid monotone, "was connected with the Tatton-Joneses, who when
+King George the Fourth--"  Sir William's cousin, needing another reel
+of cotton, glanced up, and met the stranger's gaze.
+
+"I'm sure I don't know why I'm telling you all this," said Sir
+William's cousin in an irritable tone.  "It can't possibly interest
+you."
+
+"Everything connected with you interests me," gravely the stranger
+assured her.
+
+"It is very kind of you to say so," sighed Sir William's cousin, but
+without conviction; "I am afraid sometimes I bore people."
+
+The polite stranger refrained from contradiction.
+
+"You see," continued the poor lady, "I really am of good family."
+
+"Dear lady," said the stranger, "your gentle face, your gentle voice,
+your gentle bearing, all proclaim it."
+
+She looked without flinching into the stranger's eyes, and gradually a
+smile banished the reigning dulness of her features.
+
+"How foolish of me."  She spoke rather to herself than to the
+stranger.  "Why, of course, people--people whose opinion is worth
+troubling about--judge of you by what you are, not by what you go
+about saying you are."
+
+The stranger remained silent.
+
+"I am the widow of a provincial doctor, with an income of just two
+hundred and thirty pounds per annum," she argued.  "The sensible thing
+for me to do is to make the best of it, and to worry myself about
+these high and mighty relations of mine as little as they have ever
+worried themselves about me."
+
+The stranger appeared unable to think of anything worth saying.
+
+"I have other connections," remembered Sir William's cousin; "those of
+my poor husband, to whom instead of being the 'poor relation' I could
+be the fairy god-mama.  They are my people--or would be," added Sir
+William's cousin tartly, "if I wasn't a vulgar snob."
+
+She flushed the instant she had said the words and, rising, commenced
+preparations for a hurried departure.
+
+"Now it seems I am driving you away," sighed the stranger.
+
+"Having been called a 'vulgar snob,'" retorted the lady with some
+heat, "I think it about time I went."
+
+"The words were your own," the stranger reminded her.
+
+"Whatever I may have thought," remarked the indignant dame, "no
+lady--least of all in the presence of a total stranger--would have
+called herself--"  The poor dame paused, bewildered.  "There is
+something very curious the matter with me this evening, that I cannot
+understand," she explained, "I seem quite unable to avoid insulting
+myself."
+
+Still surrounded by bewilderment, she wished the stranger good-night,
+hoping that when next they met she would be more herself.  The
+stranger, hoping so also, opened the door and closed it again behind
+her.
+
+"Tell me," laughed Miss Devine, who by sheer force of talent was
+contriving to wring harmony from the reluctant piano, "how did you
+manage to do it?  I should like to know."
+
+"How did I do what?" inquired the stranger.
+
+"Contrive to get rid so quickly of those two old frumps?"
+
+"How well you play!" observed the stranger.  "I knew you had genius
+for music the moment I saw you."
+
+"How could you tell?"
+
+"It is written so clearly in your face."
+
+The girl laughed, well pleased.  "You seem to have lost no time in
+studying my face."
+
+"It is a beautiful and interesting face," observed the stranger.
+
+She swung round sharply on the stool and their eyes met.
+
+"You can read faces?"
+
+"Yes."
+
+"Tell me, what else do you read in mine?"
+
+"Frankness, courage--"
+
+"Ah, yes, all the virtues.  Perhaps.  We will take them for granted."
+It was odd how serious the girl had suddenly become.  "Tell me the
+reverse side."
+
+"I see no reverse side," replied the stranger.  "I see but a fair
+girl, bursting into noble womanhood."
+
+"And nothing else?  You read no trace of greed, of vanity, of
+sordidness, of--"  An angry laugh escaped her lips.  "And you are a
+reader of faces!"
+
+"A reader of faces."  The stranger smiled.  "Do you know what is
+written upon yours at this very moment?  A love of truth that is
+almost fierce, scorn of lies, scorn of hypocrisy, the desire for all
+things pure, contempt of all things that are contemptible--especially
+of such things as are contemptible in woman.  Tell me, do I not read
+aright?"
+
+I wonder, thought the girl, is that why those two others both hurried
+from the room?  Does everyone feel ashamed of the littleness that is
+in them when looked at by those clear, believing eyes of yours?
+
+The idea occurred to her:  "Papa seemed to have a good deal to say to
+you during dinner.  Tell me, what were you talking about?"
+
+"The military looking gentleman upon my left?  We talked about your
+mother principally."
+
+"I am sorry," returned the girl, wishful now she had not asked the
+question.  "I was hoping he might have chosen another topic for the
+first evening!"
+
+"He did try one or two," admitted the stranger; "but I have been about
+the world so little, I was glad when he talked to me about himself.  I
+feel we shall be friends.  He spoke so nicely, too, about Mrs.
+Devine."
+
+"Indeed," commented the girl.
+
+"He told me he had been married for twenty years and had never
+regretted it but once!"
+
+Her black eyes flashed upon him, but meeting his, the suspicion died
+from them.  She turned aside to hide her smile.
+
+"So he regretted it--once."
+
+"Only once," explained the stranger, "in a passing irritable mood.  It
+was so frank of him to admit it.  He told me--I think he has taken a
+liking to me.  Indeed he hinted as much.  He said he did not often get
+an opportnnity of talking to a man like myself--he told me that he and
+your mother, when they travel together, are always mistaken for a
+honeymoon couple.  Some of the experiences he related to me were
+really quite amusing."  The stranger laughed at recollection of
+them--"that even here, in this place, they are generally referred to
+as 'Darby and Joan.'"
+
+"Yes," said the girl, "that is true.  Mr. Longcord gave them that
+name, the second evening after our arrival.  It was considered
+clever--but rather obvious I thought myself."
+
+"Nothing--so it seems to me," said the stranger, "is more beautiful
+than the love that has weathered the storms of life.  The sweet,
+tender blossom that flowers in the heart of the young--in hearts such
+as yours--that, too, is beautiful.  The love of the young for the
+young, that is the beginning of life.  But the love of the old for the
+old, that is the beginning of--of things longer."
+
+"You seem to find all things beautiful," the girl grumbled.
+
+"But are not all things beautiful?" demanded the stranger.
+
+The Colonel had finished his paper.  "You two are engaged in a very
+absorbing conversation," observed the Colonel, approaching them.
+
+"We were discussing Darbies and Joans," explained his daughter.  "How
+beautiful is the love that has weathered the storms of life!"
+
+"Ah!" smiled the Colonel, "that is hardly fair.  My friend has been
+repeating to cynical youth the confessions of an amorous husband's
+affection for his middle-aged and somewhat--"  The Colonel in playful
+mood laid his hand upon the stranger's shoulder, an action that
+necessitated his looking straight into the stranger's eyes.  The
+Colonel drew himself up stiffly and turned scarlet.
+
+Somebody was calling the Colonel a cad.  Not only that, but was
+explaining quite clearly, so that the Colonel could see it for
+himself, why he was a cad.
+
+"That you and your wife lead a cat and dog existence is a disgrace to
+both of you.  At least you might have the decency to try and hide it
+from the world--not make a jest of your shame to every passing
+stranger.  You are a cad, sir, a cad!"
+
+Who was daring to say these things?  Not the stranger, his lips had
+not moved.  Besides, it was not his voice.  Indeed it sounded much
+more like the voice of the Colonel himself.  The Colonel looked from
+the stranger to his daughter, from his daughter back to the stranger.
+Clearly they had not heard the voice--a mere hallucination.  The
+Colonel breathed again.
+
+Yet the impression remaining was not to be shaken off.  Undoubtedly it
+was bad taste to have joked to the stranger upon such a subject.  No
+gentleman would have done so.
+
+But then no gentleman would have permitted such a jest to be possible.
+No gentleman would be forever wrangling with his wife--certainly never
+in public.  However irritating the woman, a gentleman would have
+exercised self-control.
+
+Mrs. Devine had risen, was coming slowly across the room.  Fear laid
+hold of the Colonel.  She was going to address some aggravating remark
+to him--he could see it in her eye--which would irritate him into
+savage retort.
+
+Even this prize idiot of a stranger would understand why
+boarding-house wits had dubbed them "Darby and Joan," would grasp the
+fact that the gallant Colonel had thought it amusing, in conversation
+with a table acquaintance, to hold his own wife up to ridicule.
+
+"My dear," cried the Colonel, hurrying to speak first, "does not this
+room strike you as cold?  Let me fetch you a shawl."
+
+It was useless:  the Colonel felt it.  It had been too long the custom
+of both of them to preface with politeness their deadliest insults to
+each other.  She came on, thinking of a suitable reply:  suitable from
+her point of view, that is.  In another moment the truth would be out.
+A wild, fantastic possibility flashed through the Colonel's brain:  If
+to him, why not to her?
+
+"Letitia," cried the Colonel, and the tone of his voice surprised her
+into silence, "I want you to look closely at our friend.  Does he not
+remind you of someone?"
+
+Mrs. Devine, so urged, looked at the stranger long and hard.  "Yes,"
+she murmured, turning to her husband, "he does, who is it?"
+
+"I cannot fix it," replied the Colonel; "I thought that maybe you
+would remember."
+
+"It will come to me," mused Mrs. Devine.  "It is someone--years ago,
+when I was a girl--in Devonshire.  Thank you, if it isn't troubling
+you, Harry.  I left it in the dining-room."
+
+It was, as Mr. Augustus Longcord explained to his partner Isidore, the
+colossal foolishness of the stranger that was the cause of all the
+trouble.  "Give me a man, who can take care of himself--or thinks he
+can," declared Augustus Longcord, "and I am prepared to give a good
+account of myself.  But when a helpless baby refuses even to look at
+what you call your figures, tells you that your mere word is
+sufficient for him, and hands you over his cheque-book to fill up for
+yourself--well, it isn't playing the game."
+
+"Auguthuth," was the curt comment of his partner, "you're a fool."
+
+"All right, my boy, you try," suggested Augustus.
+
+"Jutht what I mean to do," asserted his partner.
+
+"Well," demanded Augustus one evening later, meeting Isidore ascending
+the stairs after a long talk with the stranger in the dining-room with
+the door shut.
+
+"Oh, don't arth me," retorted Isidore, "thilly ath, thath what he
+ith."
+
+"What did he say?"
+
+"What did he thay! talked about the Jewth:  what a grand rathe they
+were--how people mithjudged them:  all that thort of rot.
+
+"Thaid thome of the motht honorable men he had ever met had been
+Jewth.  Thought I wath one of 'em!"
+
+"Well, did you get anything out of him?"
+
+"Get anything out of him.  Of courthe not.  Couldn't very well thell
+the whole rathe, ath it were, for a couple of hundred poundth, after
+that.  Didn't theem worth it."
+
+There were many things Forty-eight Bloomsbury Square came gradually to
+the conclusion were not worth the doing:--Snatching at the gravy;
+pouncing out of one's turn upon the vegetables and helping oneself to
+more than one's fair share; manoeuvering for the easy-chair; sitting
+on the evening paper while pretending not to have seen it--all
+such-like tiresome bits of business.  For the little one made out of
+it, really it was not worth the bother.  Grumbling everlastingly at
+one's food; grumbling everlastingly at most things; abusing
+Pennycherry behind her back; abusing, for a change, one's
+fellow-boarders; squabbling with one's fellow-boarders about nothing
+in particular; sneering at one's fellow-boarders;  talking scandal of
+one's fellow-boarders; making senseless jokes about one's
+fellow-boarders; talking big about oneself, nobody believing one--all
+such-like vulgarities.  Other boarding-houses might indulge in them:
+Forty-eight Bloomsbury Square had its dignity to consider.
+
+The truth is, Forty-eight Bloomsbury Square was coming to a very good
+opinion of itself:  for the which not Bloomsbury Square so much as the
+stranger must be blamed.  The stranger had arrived at Forty-eight
+Bloomsbury Square with the preconceived idea--where obtained from
+Heaven knows--that its seemingly commonplace, mean-minded,
+coarse-fibred occupants were in reality ladies and gentlemen of the
+first water; and time and observation had apparently only strengthened
+this absurd idea.  The natural result was, Forty-eight Bloomsbury
+Square was coming round to the stranger's opinion of itself.
+
+Mrs. Pennycherry, the stranger would persist in regarding as a lady
+born and bred, compelled by circumstances over which she had no
+control to fill an arduous but honorable position of middle-class
+society--a sort of foster-mother, to whom were due the thanks and
+gratitude of her promiscuous family; and this view of herself Mrs.
+Pennycherry now clung to with obstinate conviction.  There were
+disadvantages attaching, but these Mrs. Pennycherry appeared prepared
+to suffer cheerfully.  A lady born and bred cannot charge other ladies
+and gentlemen for coals and candles they have never burnt; a
+foster-mother cannot palm off upon her children New Zealand mutton for
+Southdown.  A mere lodging-house-keeper can play these tricks, and
+pocket the profits.  But a lady feels she cannot:  Mrs. Pennycherry
+felt she no longer could.
+
+To the stranger Miss Kite was a witty and delightful conversationalist
+of most attractive personality.  Miss Kite had one failing:  it was
+lack of vanity.  She was unaware of her own delicate and refined
+beauty.  If Miss Kite could only see herself with his, the stranger's
+eyes, the modesty that rendered her distrustful of her natural charms
+would fall from her.  The stranger was so sure of it Miss Kite
+determined to put it to the test.  One evening, an hour before dinner,
+there entered the drawing-room, when the stranger only was there and
+before the gas was lighted, a pleasant, good-looking lady, somewhat
+pale, with neatly-arranged brown hair, who demanded of the stranger if
+he knew her.  All her body was trembling, and her voice seemed
+inclined to run away from her and become a sob.  But when the
+stranger, looking straight into her eyes, told her that from the
+likeness he thought she must be Miss Kite's younger sister, but much
+prettier, it became a laugh instead:  and that evening the
+golden-haired Miss Kite disappeared never to show her high-coloured
+face again; and what perhaps, more than all else, might have impressed
+some former habitue of Forty-eight Bloomsbury Square with awe, it was
+that no one in the house made even a passing inquiry concerning her.
+
+Sir William's cousin the stranger thought an acquisition to any
+boarding-house.  A lady of high-class family!  There was nothing
+outward or visible perhaps to tell you that she was of high-class
+family.  She herself, naturally, would not mention the fact, yet
+somehow you felt it.  Unconsciously she set a high-class tone,
+diffused an atmosphere of gentle manners.  Not that the stranger had
+said this in so many words; Sir William's cousin gathered that he
+thought it, and felt herself in agreement with him.
+
+For Mr. Longcord and his partner, as representatives of the best type
+of business men, the stranger had a great respect.  With what
+unfortunate results to themselves has been noted.  The curious thing
+is that the Firm appeared content with the price they had paid for the
+stranger's good opinion--had even, it was rumoured, acquired a taste
+for honest men's respect--that in the long run was likely to cost them
+dear.  But we all have our pet extravagance.
+
+The Colonel and Mrs. Devine both suffered a good deal at first from
+the necessity imposed upon them of learning, somewhat late in life,
+new tricks.  In the privacy of their own apartment they condoled with
+one another.
+
+"Tomfool nonsense," grumbled the Colonel, "you and I starting billing
+and cooing at our age!"
+
+"What I object to," said Mrs. Devine, "is the feeling that somehow I
+am being made to do it."
+
+"The idea that a man and his wife cannot have their little joke
+together for fear of what some impertinent jackanapes may think of
+them! it's damn ridiculous," the Colonel exploded.
+
+"Even when he isn't there," said Mrs. Devine, "I seem to see him
+looking at me with those vexing eyes of his.  Really the man quite
+haunts me."
+
+"I have met him somewhere," mused the Colonel, "I'll swear I've met
+him somewhere.  I wish to goodness he would go."
+
+A hundred things a day the Colonel wanted to say to Mrs. Devine, a
+hundred things a day Mrs. Devine would have liked to observe to the
+Colonel.  But by the time the opportunity occurred--when nobody else
+was by to hear--all interest in saying them was gone.
+
+"Women will be women," was the sentiment with which the Colonel
+consoled himself.  "A man must bear with them--must never forget that
+he is a gentleman."
+
+"Oh, well, I suppose they're all alike," laughed Mrs. Devine to
+herself, having arrived at that stage of despair when one seeks refuge
+in cheerfulness.  "What's the use of putting oneself out--it does no
+good, and only upsets one."  There is a certain satisfaction in
+feeling you are bearing with heroic resignation the irritating follies
+of others.  Colonel and Mrs. Devine came to enjoy the luxury of much
+self-approbation.
+
+But the person seriously annoyed by the stranger's bigoted belief in
+the innate goodness of everyone he came across was the languid,
+handsome Miss Devine.  The stranger would have it that Miss Devine was
+a noble-souled, high-minded young woman, something midway between a
+Flora Macdonald and a Joan of Arc.  Miss Devine, on the contrary, knew
+herself to be a sleek, luxury-loving animal, quite willing to sell
+herself to the bidder who could offer her the finest clothes, the
+richest foods, the most sumptuous surroundings.  Such a bidder was to
+hand in the person of a retired bookmaker, a somewhat greasy old
+gentleman, but exceedingly rich and undoubtedly fond of her.
+
+Miss Devine, having made up her mind that the thing had got to be
+done, was anxious that it should be done quickly.  And here it was
+that the stranger's ridiculous opinion of her not only irritated but
+inconvenienced her.  Under the very eyes of a person--however
+foolish--convinced that you are possessed of all the highest
+attributes of your sex, it is difficult to behave as though actuated
+by only the basest motives.  A dozen times had Miss Devine determined
+to end the matter by formal acceptance of her elderly admirer's large
+and flabby hand, and a dozen times--the vision intervening of the
+stranger's grave, believing eyes--had Miss Devine refused decided
+answer.  The stranger would one day depart.  Indeed, he had told her
+himself, he was but a passing traveller.  When he was gone it would be
+easier.  So she thought at the time.
+
+One afternoon the stranger entered the room where she was standing by
+the window, looking out upon the bare branches of the trees in
+Bloomsbury Square.  She remembered afterwards, it was just such
+another foggy afternoon as the afternoon of the stranger's arrival
+three months before.  No one else was in the room.  The stranger
+closed the door, and came towards her with that curious, quick-leaping
+step of his.  His long coat was tightly buttoned, and in his hands he
+carried his old felt hat and the massive knotted stick that was almost
+a staff.
+
+"I have come to say good-bye," explained the stranger.  "I am going."
+
+"I shall not see you again?" asked the girl.
+
+"I cannot say," replied the stranger.  "But you will think of me?"
+
+"Yes," she answered with a smile, "I can promise that."
+
+"And I shall always remember you," promised the stranger, "and I wish
+you every joy--the joy of love, the joy of a happy marriage."
+
+The girl winced.  "Love and marriage are not always the same thing,"
+she said.
+
+"Not always," agreed the stranger, "but in your case they will be
+one."
+
+She looked at him.
+
+"Do you think I have not noticed?" smiled the stranger, "a gallant,
+handsome lad, and clever.  You love him and he loves you.  I could not
+have gone away without knowing it was well with you."
+
+Her gaze wandered towards the fading light.
+
+"Ah, yes, I love him," she answered petulantly.  "Your eyes can see
+clearly enough, when they want to.  But one does not live on love, in
+our world.  I will tell you the man I am going to marry if you care to
+know."  She would not meet his eyes.  She kept her gaze still fixed
+upon the dingy trees, the mist beyond, and spoke rapidly and
+vehemently:  "The man who can give me all my soul's desire--money and
+the things that money can buy.  You think me a woman, I'm only a pig.
+He is moist, and breathes like a porpoise; with cunning in place of a
+brain, and the rest of him mere stomach.  But he is good enough for
+me."
+
+She hoped this would shock the stranger and that now, perhaps, he
+would go.  It irritated her to hear him only laugh.
+
+"No," he said, "you will not marry him."
+
+"Who will stop me?" she cried angrily.
+
+"Your Better Self."
+
+His voice had a strange ring of authority, compelling her to turn and
+look upon his face.  Yes, it was true, the fancy that from the very
+first had haunted her.  She had met him, talked to him--in silent
+country roads, in crowded city streets, where was it?  And always in
+talking with him her spirit had been lifted up:  she had been--what he
+had always thought her.
+
+"There are those," continued the stranger (and for the first time she
+saw that he was of a noble presence, that his gentle, child-like eyes
+could also command), "whose Better Self lies slain by their own hand
+and troubles them no more.  But yours, my child, you have let grow too
+strong; it will ever be your master.  You must obey.  Flee from it and
+it will follow you; you cannot escape it.  Insult it and it will
+chastise you with burning shame, with stinging self-reproach from day
+to day."  The sternness faded from the beautiful face, the tenderness
+crept back.  He laid his hand upon the young girl's shoulder.  "You
+will marry your lover," he smiled.  "With him you will walk the way of
+sunlight and of shadow."
+
+And the girl, looking up into the strong, calm face, knew that it
+would be so, that the power of resisting her Better Self had passed
+away from her for ever.
+
+"Now," said the stranger, "come to the door with me.  Leave-takings
+are but wasted sadness.  Let me pass out quietly.  Close the door
+softly behind me."
+
+She thought that perhaps he would turn his face again, but she saw no
+more of him than the odd roundness of his back under the tightly
+buttoned coat, before he faded into the gathering fog.
+
+Then softly she closed the door.
+
+*** End of Project Gutenberg etext of Pass of the Third Floor Back ***
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+Project Gutenberg’s Passing of the Third Floor Back, by Jerome K. Jerome
+
+This eBook is for the use of anyone anywhere at no cost and with
+almost no restrictions whatsoever.  You may copy it, give it away or
+re-use it under the terms of the Project Gutenberg License included
+with this eBook or online at www.gutenberg.org
+
+
+Title: Passing of the Third Floor Back
+
+Author: Jerome K. Jerome
+
+Posting Date: July 26, 2008 [EBook #865]
+Release Date: April 1997
+Last Updated: October 8, 2016
+
+Language: English
+
+Character set encoding: UTF-8
+
+*** START OF THIS PROJECT GUTENBERG EBOOK PASSING OF THE THIRD FLOOR BACK ***
+
+
+
+
+Produced by Ron Burkey, and Amy Thomte
+
+
+
+
+
+PASSING OF THE THIRD FLOOR BACK
+
+By Jerome K. Jerome
+
+
+Author of “Paul Kelver,” “Three Men in a Boat,” etc., etc.
+
+New York
+
+Dodd, Mead & Company
+
+1909
+
+
+Copyright, 1904, By Jerome K. Jerome
+
+Copyright, 1908, By Dodd, Mead & Company
+
+Published, September, 1908
+
+
+
+The neighbourhood of Bloomsbury Square towards four o’clock of a
+November afternoon is not so crowded as to secure to the stranger, of
+appearance anything out of the common, immunity from observation. Tibb’s
+boy, screaming at the top of his voice that _she_ was his honey, stopped
+suddenly, stepped backwards on to the toes of a voluble young lady
+wheeling a perambulator, and remained deaf, apparently, to the somewhat
+personal remarks of the voluble young lady. Not until he had reached
+the next corner--and then more as a soliloquy than as information to the
+street--did Tibb’s boy recover sufficient interest in his own affairs to
+remark that _he_ was her bee. The voluble young lady herself, following
+some half-a-dozen yards behind, forgot her wrongs in contemplation
+of the stranger’s back. There was this that was peculiar about the
+stranger’s back: that instead of being flat it presented a decided
+curve. “It ain’t a ‘ump, and it don’t look like kervitcher of the
+spine,” observed the voluble young lady to herself. “Blimy if I don’t
+believe ‘e’s taking ‘ome ‘is washing up his back.”
+
+The constable at the corner, trying to seem busy doing nothing, noticed
+the stranger’s approach with gathering interest. “That’s an odd sort of
+a walk of yours, young man,” thought the constable. “You take care you
+don’t fall down and tumble over yourself.”
+
+“Thought he was a young man,” murmured the constable, the stranger
+having passed him. “He had a young face right enough.”
+
+The daylight was fading. The stranger, finding it impossible to read the
+name of the street upon the corner house, turned back.
+
+“Why, ‘tis a young man,” the constable told himself; “a mere boy.”
+
+“I beg your pardon,” said the stranger; “but would you mind telling me
+my way to Bloomsbury Square.”
+
+“This is Bloomsbury Square,” explained the constable; “leastways round
+the corner is. What number might you be wanting?”
+
+The stranger took from the ticket pocket of his tightly buttoned
+overcoat a piece of paper, unfolded it and read it out: “Mrs.
+Pennycherry. Number Forty-eight.”
+
+“Round to the left,” instructed him the constable; “fourth house. Been
+recommended there?”
+
+“By--by a friend,” replied the stranger. “Thank you very much.”
+
+“Ah,” muttered the constable to himself; “guess you won’t be calling him
+that by the end of the week, young--”
+
+“Funny,” added the constable, gazing after the retreating figure of the
+stranger. “Seen plenty of the other sex as looked young behind and old
+in front. This cove looks young in front and old behind. Guess he’ll
+look old all round if he stops long at mother Pennycherry’s: stingy old
+cat.”
+
+Constables whose beat included Bloomsbury Square had their reasons for
+not liking Mrs. Pennycherry. Indeed it might have been difficult to
+discover any human being with reasons for liking that sharp-featured
+lady. Maybe the keeping of second-rate boarding houses in the
+neighbourhood of Bloomsbury does not tend to develop the virtues of
+generosity and amiability.
+
+Meanwhile the stranger, proceeding upon his way, had rung the bell of
+Number Forty-eight. Mrs. Pennycherry, peeping from the area and catching
+a glimpse, above the railings, of a handsome if somewhat effeminate
+masculine face, hastened to readjust her widow’s cap before the
+looking-glass while directing Mary Jane to show the stranger, should he
+prove a problematical boarder, into the dining-room, and to light the
+gas.
+
+“And don’t stop gossiping, and don’t you take it upon yourself to answer
+questions. Say I’ll be up in a minute,” were Mrs. Pennycherry’s further
+instructions, “and mind you hide your hands as much as you can.”
+
+***
+
+“What are you grinning at?” demanded Mrs. Pennycherry, a couple of
+minutes later, of the dingy Mary Jane.
+
+“Wasn’t grinning,” explained the meek Mary Jane, “was only smiling to
+myself.”
+
+“What at?”
+
+“Dunno,” admitted Mary Jane. But still she went on smiling.
+
+“What’s he like then?” demanded Mrs. Pennycherry.
+
+“‘E ain’t the usual sort,” was Mary Jane’s opinion.
+
+“Thank God for that,” ejaculated Mrs. Pennycherry piously.
+
+“Says ‘e’s been recommended, by a friend.”
+
+“By whom?”
+
+“By a friend. ‘E didn’t say no name.” Mrs. Pennycherry pondered. “He’s
+not the funny sort, is he?”
+
+Not that sort at all. Mary Jane was sure of it.
+
+Mrs. Pennycherry ascended the stairs still pondering. As she entered the
+room the stranger rose and bowed. Nothing could have been simpler than
+the stranger’s bow, yet there came with it to Mrs. Pennycherry a rush of
+old sensations long forgotten. For one brief moment Mrs. Pennycherry saw
+herself an amiable well-bred lady, widow of a solicitor: a visitor
+had called to see her. It was but a momentary fancy. The next instant
+Reality reasserted itself. Mrs. Pennycherry, a lodging-house keeper,
+existing precariously upon a daily round of petty meannesses, was
+prepared for contest with a possible new boarder, who fortunately looked
+an inexperienced young gentleman.
+
+“Someone has recommended me to you,” began Mrs. Pennycherry; “may I ask
+who?”
+
+But the stranger waved the question aside as immaterial.
+
+“You might not remember--him,” he smiled. “He thought that I should do
+well to pass the few months I am given--that I have to be in London,
+here. You can take me in?”
+
+Mrs. Pennycherry thought that she would be able to take the stranger in.
+
+“A room to sleep in,” explained the stranger, “--any room will do--with
+food and drink sufficient for a man, is all that I require.”
+
+“For breakfast,” began Mrs. Pennycherry, “I always give--”
+
+“What is right and proper, I am convinced,” interrupted the stranger.
+“Pray do not trouble to go into detail, Mrs. Pennycherry. With whatever
+it is I shall be content.”
+
+Mrs. Pennycherry, puzzled, shot a quick glance at the stranger, but his
+face, though the gentle eyes were smiling, was frank and serious.
+
+“At all events you will see the room,” suggested Mrs. Pennycherry,
+“before we discuss terms.”
+
+“Certainly,” agreed the stranger. “I am a little tired and shall be glad
+to rest there.”
+
+Mrs. Pennycherry led the way upward; on the landing of the third floor,
+paused a moment undecided, then opened the door of the back bedroom.
+
+“It is very comfortable,” commented the stranger.
+
+“For this room,” stated Mrs. Pennycherry, “together with full board,
+consisting of--”
+
+“Of everything needful. It goes without saying,” again interrupted the
+stranger with his quiet grave smile.
+
+“I have generally asked,” continued Mrs. Pennycherry, “four pounds a
+week. To you--” Mrs. Pennycherry’s voice, unknown to her, took to itself
+the note of aggressive generosity--“seeing you have been recommended
+here, say three pounds ten.”
+
+“Dear lady,” said the stranger, “that is kind of you. As you have
+divined, I am not a rich man. If it be not imposing upon you I accept
+your reduction with gratitude.”
+
+Again Mrs. Pennycherry, familiar with the satirical method, shot a
+suspicious glance upon the stranger, but not a line was there, upon
+that smooth fair face, to which a sneer could for a moment have clung.
+Clearly he was as simple as he looked.
+
+“Gas, of course, extra.”
+
+“Of course,” agreed the Stranger.
+
+“Coals--”
+
+“We shall not quarrel,” for a third time the stranger interrupted. “You
+have been very considerate to me as it is. I feel, Mrs. Pennycherry, I
+can leave myself entirely in your hands.”
+
+The stranger appeared anxious to be alone. Mrs. Pennycherry, having put
+a match to the stranger’s fire, turned to depart. And at this point it
+was that Mrs. Pennycherry, the holder hitherto of an unbroken record
+for sanity, behaved in a manner she herself, five minutes earlier in her
+career, would have deemed impossible--that no living soul who had ever
+known her would have believed, even had Mrs. Pennycherry gone down upon
+her knees and sworn it to them.
+
+“Did I say three pound ten?” demanded Mrs. Pennycherry of the stranger,
+her hand upon the door. She spoke crossly. She was feeling cross, with
+the stranger, with herself--particularly with herself.
+
+“You were kind enough to reduce it to that amount,” replied the
+stranger; “but if upon reflection you find yourself unable--”
+
+“I was making a mistake,” said Mrs. Pennycherry, “it should have been
+two pound ten.”
+
+“I cannot--I will not accept such sacrifice,” exclaimed the stranger;
+“the three pound ten I can well afford.”
+
+“Two pound ten are my terms,” snapped Mrs. Pennycherry. “If you are bent
+on paying more, you can go elsewhere. You’ll find plenty to oblige you.”
+
+Her vehemence must have impressed the stranger. “We will not contend
+further,” he smiled. “I was merely afraid that in the goodness of your
+heart--”
+
+“Oh, it isn’t as good as all that,” growled Mrs. Pennycherry.
+
+“I am not so sure,” returned the stranger. “I am somewhat suspicious of
+you. But wilful woman must, I suppose, have her way.”
+
+The stranger held out his hand, and to Mrs. Pennycherry, at that moment,
+it seemed the most natural thing in the world to take it as if it had
+been the hand of an old friend and to end the interview with a pleasant
+laugh--though laughing was an exercise not often indulged in by Mrs.
+Pennycherry.
+
+Mary Jane was standing by the window, her hands folded in front of her,
+when Mrs. Pennycherry re-entered the kitchen. By standing close to
+the window one caught a glimpse of the trees in Bloomsbury Square and
+through their bare branches of the sky beyond.
+
+“There’s nothing much to do for the next half hour, till Cook comes
+back. I’ll see to the door if you’d like a run out?” suggested Mrs.
+Pennycherry.
+
+“It would be nice,” agreed the girl so soon as she had recovered power
+of speech; “it’s just the time of day I like.”
+
+“Don’t be longer than the half hour,” added Mrs. Pennycherry.
+
+Forty-eight Bloomsbury Square, assembled after dinner in the
+drawing-room, discussed the stranger with that freedom and frankness
+characteristic of Forty-eight Bloomsbury Square, towards the absent.
+
+“Not what I call a smart young man,” was the opinion of Augustus
+Longcord, who was something in the City.
+
+“Thpeaking for mythelf,” commented his partner Isidore, “hav’n’th any
+uthe for the thmart young man. Too many of him, ath it ith.”
+
+“Must be pretty smart if he’s one too many for you,” laughed his
+partner.
+
+There was this to be said for the repartee of Forty-eight Bloomsbury
+Square: it was simple of construction and easy of comprehension.
+
+“Well it made me feel good just looking at him,” declared Miss Kite, the
+highly coloured. “It was his clothes, I suppose--made me think of Noah
+and the ark--all that sort of thing.”
+
+“It would be clothes that would make you think--if anything,” drawled
+the languid Miss Devine. She was a tall, handsome girl, engaged at the
+moment in futile efforts to recline with elegance and comfort combined
+upon a horsehair sofa. Miss Kite, by reason of having secured the only
+easy-chair, was unpopular that evening; so that Miss Devine’s remark
+received from the rest of the company more approbation than perhaps it
+merited.
+
+“Is that intended to be clever, dear, or only rude?” Miss Kite requested
+to be informed.
+
+“Both,” claimed Miss Devine.
+
+“Myself? I must confess,” shouted the tall young lady’s father, commonly
+called the Colonel, “I found him a fool.”
+
+“I noticed you seemed to be getting on very well together,” purred his
+wife, a plump, smiling little lady.
+
+“Possibly we were,” retorted the Colonel. “Fate has accustomed me to the
+society of fools.”
+
+“Isn’t it a pity to start quarrelling immediately after dinner, you
+two,” suggested their thoughtful daughter from the sofa, “you’ll have
+nothing left to amuse you for the rest of the evening.”
+
+“He didn’t strike me as a conversationalist,” said the lady who was
+cousin to a baronet; “but he did pass the vegetables before he helped
+himself. A little thing like that shows breeding.”
+
+“Or that he didn’t know you and thought maybe you’d leave him half a
+spoonful,” laughed Augustus the wit.
+
+“What I can’t make out about him--” shouted the Colonel.
+
+The stranger entered the room.
+
+The Colonel, securing the evening paper, retired into a corner. The
+highly coloured Kite, reaching down from the mantelpiece a paper fan,
+held it coyly before her face. Miss Devine sat upright on the horse-hair
+sofa, and rearranged her skirts.
+
+“Know anything?” demanded Augustus of the stranger, breaking the
+somewhat remarkable silence.
+
+The stranger evidently did not understand. It was necessary for
+Augustus, the witty, to advance further into that odd silence.
+
+“What’s going to pull off the Lincoln handicap? Tell me, and I’ll go out
+straight and put my shirt upon it.”
+
+“I think you would act unwisely,” smiled the stranger; “I am not an
+authority upon the subject.”
+
+“Not! Why they told me you were Captain Spy of the _Sporting Life_--in
+disguise.”
+
+It would have been difficult for a joke to fall more flat. Nobody
+laughed, though why Mr. Augustus Longcord could not understand, and
+maybe none of his audience could have told him, for at Forty-eight
+Bloomsbury Square Mr. Augustus Longcord passed as a humorist. The
+stranger himself appeared unaware that he was being made fun of.
+
+“You have been misinformed,” assured him the stranger.
+
+“I beg your pardon,” said Mr. Augustus Longcord.
+
+“It is nothing,” replied the stranger in his sweet low voice, and passed
+on.
+
+“Well what about this theatre,” demanded Mr. Longcord of his friend
+and partner; “do you want to go or don’t you?” Mr. Longcord was feeling
+irritable.
+
+“Goth the ticketh--may ath well,” thought Isidore.
+
+“Damn stupid piece, I’m told.”
+
+“Motht of them thupid, more or leth. Pity to wathte the ticketh,” argued
+Isidore, and the pair went out.
+
+“Are you staying long in London?” asked Miss Kite, raising her practised
+eyes towards the stranger.
+
+“Not long,” answered the stranger. “At least I do not know. It depends.”
+
+An unusual quiet had invaded the drawing-room of Forty-eight Bloomsbury
+Square, generally noisy with strident voices about this hour. The
+Colonel remained engrossed in his paper. Mrs. Devine sat with her plump
+white hands folded on her lap, whether asleep or not it was impossible
+to say. The lady who was cousin to a baronet had shifted her chair
+beneath the gasolier, her eyes bent on her everlasting crochet work. The
+languid Miss Devine had crossed to the piano, where she sat fingering
+softly the tuneless keys, her back to the cold barely-furnished room.
+
+“Sit down!” commanded saucily Miss Kite, indicating with her fan the
+vacant seat beside her. “Tell me about yourself. You interest me.” Miss
+Kite adopted a pretty authoritative air towards all youthful-looking
+members of the opposite sex. It harmonised with the peach complexion and
+the golden hair, and fitted her about as well.
+
+“I am glad of that,” answered the stranger, taking the chair suggested.
+“I so wish to interest you.”
+
+“You’re a very bold boy.” Miss Kite lowered her fan, for the purpose of
+glancing archly over the edge of it, and for the first time encountered
+the eyes of the stranger looking into hers. And then it was that Miss
+Kite experienced precisely the same curious sensation that an hour or so
+ago had troubled Mrs. Pennycherry when the stranger had first bowed to
+her. It seemed to Miss Kite that she was no longer the Miss Kite that,
+had she risen and looked into it, the fly-blown mirror over the marble
+mantelpiece would, she knew, have presented to her view; but quite
+another Miss Kite--a cheerful, bright-eyed lady verging on middle age,
+yet still good-looking in spite of her faded complexion and somewhat
+thin brown locks. Miss Kite felt a pang of jealousy shoot through her;
+this middle-aged Miss Kite seemed, on the whole, a more attractive
+lady. There was a wholesomeness, a broadmindedness about her that
+instinctively drew one towards her. Not hampered, as Miss Kite herself
+was, by the necessity of appearing to be somewhere between eighteen and
+twenty-two, this other Miss Kite could talk sensibly, even brilliantly:
+one felt it. A thoroughly “nice” woman this other Miss Kite; the real
+Miss Kite, though envious, was bound to admit it. Miss Kite wished to
+goodness she had never seen the woman. The glimpse of her had rendered
+Miss Kite dissatisfied with herself.
+
+“I am not a boy,” explained the stranger; “and I had no intention of
+being bold.”
+
+“I know,” replied Miss Kite. “It was a silly remark. Whatever induced me
+to make it, I can’t think. Getting foolish in my old age, I suppose.”
+
+The stranger laughed. “Surely you are not old.”
+
+“I’m thirty-nine,” snapped out Miss Kite. “You don’t call it young?”
+
+“I think it a beautiful age,” insisted the stranger; “young enough not
+to have lost the joy of youth, old enough to have learnt sympathy.”
+
+“Oh, I daresay,” returned Miss Kite, “any age you’d think beautiful.
+I’m going to bed.” Miss Kite rose. The paper fan had somehow got itself
+broken. She threw the fragments into the fire.
+
+“It is early yet,” pleaded the stranger, “I was looking forward to a
+talk with you.”
+
+“Well, you’ll be able to look forward to it,” retorted Miss Kite.
+“Good-night.”
+
+The truth was, Miss Kite was impatient to have a look at herself in the
+glass, in her own room with the door shut. The vision of that other Miss
+Kite--the clean-looking lady of the pale face and the brown hair had
+been so vivid, Miss Kite wondered whether temporary forgetfulness might
+not have fallen upon her while dressing for dinner that evening.
+
+The stranger, left to his own devices, strolled towards the loo table,
+seeking something to read.
+
+“You seem to have frightened away Miss Kite,” remarked the lady who was
+cousin to a baronet.
+
+“It seems so,” admitted the stranger.
+
+“My cousin, Sir William Bosster,” observed the crocheting lady, “who
+married old Lord Egham’s niece--you never met the Eghams?”
+
+“Hitherto,” replied the stranger, “I have not had that pleasure.”
+
+“A charming family. Cannot understand--my cousin Sir William, I mean,
+cannot understand my remaining here. ‘My dear Emily’--he says the same
+thing every time he sees me: ‘My dear Emily, how can you exist among the
+sort of people one meets with in a boarding-house.’ But they amuse me.”
+
+A sense of humour, agreed the stranger, was always of advantage.
+
+“Our family on my mother’s side,” continued Sir William’s cousin in her
+placid monotone, “was connected with the Tatton-Joneses, who when King
+George the Fourth--” Sir William’s cousin, needing another reel of
+cotton, glanced up, and met the stranger’s gaze.
+
+“I’m sure I don’t know why I’m telling you all this,” said Sir William’s
+cousin in an irritable tone. “It can’t possibly interest you.”
+
+“Everything connected with you interests me,” gravely the stranger
+assured her.
+
+“It is very kind of you to say so,” sighed Sir William’s cousin, but
+without conviction; “I am afraid sometimes I bore people.”
+
+The polite stranger refrained from contradiction.
+
+“You see,” continued the poor lady, “I really am of good family.”
+
+“Dear lady,” said the stranger, “your gentle face, your gentle voice,
+your gentle bearing, all proclaim it.”
+
+She looked without flinching into the stranger’s eyes, and gradually a
+smile banished the reigning dulness of her features.
+
+“How foolish of me.” She spoke rather to herself than to the stranger.
+“Why, of course, people--people whose opinion is worth troubling
+about--judge of you by what you are, not by what you go about saying you
+are.”
+
+The stranger remained silent.
+
+“I am the widow of a provincial doctor, with an income of just two
+hundred and thirty pounds per annum,” she argued. “The sensible thing
+for me to do is to make the best of it, and to worry myself about these
+high and mighty relations of mine as little as they have ever worried
+themselves about me.”
+
+The stranger appeared unable to think of anything worth saying.
+
+“I have other connections,” remembered Sir William’s cousin; “those of
+my poor husband, to whom instead of being the ‘poor relation’ I could
+be the fairy god-mama. They are my people--or would be,” added Sir
+William’s cousin tartly, “if I wasn’t a vulgar snob.”
+
+She flushed the instant she had said the words and, rising, commenced
+preparations for a hurried departure.
+
+“Now it seems I am driving you away,” sighed the stranger.
+
+“Having been called a ‘vulgar snob,’” retorted the lady with some heat,
+“I think it about time I went.”
+
+“The words were your own,” the stranger reminded her.
+
+“Whatever I may have thought,” remarked the indignant dame, “no
+lady--least of all in the presence of a total stranger--would have
+called herself--” The poor dame paused, bewildered. “There is something
+very curious the matter with me this evening, that I cannot understand,”
+ she explained, “I seem quite unable to avoid insulting myself.”
+
+Still surrounded by bewilderment, she wished the stranger good-night,
+hoping that when next they met she would be more herself. The stranger,
+hoping so also, opened the door and closed it again behind her.
+
+“Tell me,” laughed Miss Devine, who by sheer force of talent was
+contriving to wring harmony from the reluctant piano, “how did you
+manage to do it? I should like to know.”
+
+“How did I do what?” inquired the stranger.
+
+“Contrive to get rid so quickly of those two old frumps?”
+
+“How well you play!” observed the stranger. “I knew you had genius for
+music the moment I saw you.”
+
+“How could you tell?”
+
+“It is written so clearly in your face.”
+
+The girl laughed, well pleased. “You seem to have lost no time in
+studying my face.”
+
+“It is a beautiful and interesting face,” observed the stranger.
+
+She swung round sharply on the stool and their eyes met.
+
+“You can read faces?”
+
+“Yes.”
+
+“Tell me, what else do you read in mine?”
+
+“Frankness, courage--”
+
+“Ah, yes, all the virtues. Perhaps. We will take them for granted.” It
+was odd how serious the girl had suddenly become. “Tell me the reverse
+side.”
+
+“I see no reverse side,” replied the stranger. “I see but a fair girl,
+bursting into noble womanhood.”
+
+“And nothing else? You read no trace of greed, of vanity, of sordidness,
+of--” An angry laugh escaped her lips. “And you are a reader of faces!”
+
+“A reader of faces.” The stranger smiled. “Do you know what is written
+upon yours at this very moment? A love of truth that is almost fierce,
+scorn of lies, scorn of hypocrisy, the desire for all things pure,
+contempt of all things that are contemptible--especially of such things
+as are contemptible in woman. Tell me, do I not read aright?”
+
+I wonder, thought the girl, is that why those two others both hurried
+from the room? Does everyone feel ashamed of the littleness that is in
+them when looked at by those clear, believing eyes of yours?
+
+The idea occurred to her: “Papa seemed to have a good deal to say to you
+during dinner. Tell me, what were you talking about?”
+
+“The military looking gentleman upon my left? We talked about your
+mother principally.”
+
+“I am sorry,” returned the girl, wishful now she had not asked the
+question. “I was hoping he might have chosen another topic for the first
+evening!”
+
+“He did try one or two,” admitted the stranger; “but I have been about
+the world so little, I was glad when he talked to me about himself. I
+feel we shall be friends. He spoke so nicely, too, about Mrs. Devine.”
+
+“Indeed,” commented the girl.
+
+“He told me he had been married for twenty years and had never regretted
+it but once!”
+
+Her black eyes flashed upon him, but meeting his, the suspicion died
+from them. She turned aside to hide her smile.
+
+“So he regretted it--once.”
+
+“Only once,” explained the stranger, “in a passing irritable mood. It
+was so frank of him to admit it. He told me--I think he has taken a
+liking to me. Indeed he hinted as much. He said he did not often get an
+opportunity of talking to a man like myself--he told me that he and your
+mother, when they travel together, are always mistaken for a honeymoon
+couple. Some of the experiences he related to me were really quite
+amusing.” The stranger laughed at recollection of them--“that even here,
+in this place, they are generally referred to as ‘Darby and Joan.’”
+
+“Yes,” said the girl, “that is true. Mr. Longcord gave them that name,
+the second evening after our arrival. It was considered clever--but
+rather obvious I thought myself.”
+
+“Nothing--so it seems to me,” said the stranger, “is more beautiful
+than the love that has weathered the storms of life. The sweet, tender
+blossom that flowers in the heart of the young--in hearts such as
+yours--that, too, is beautiful. The love of the young for the young,
+that is the beginning of life. But the love of the old for the old, that
+is the beginning of--of things longer.”
+
+“You seem to find all things beautiful,” the girl grumbled.
+
+“But are not all things beautiful?” demanded the stranger.
+
+The Colonel had finished his paper. “You two are engaged in a very
+absorbing conversation,” observed the Colonel, approaching them.
+
+“We were discussing Darbies and Joans,” explained his daughter. “How
+beautiful is the love that has weathered the storms of life!”
+
+“Ah!” smiled the Colonel, “that is hardly fair. My friend has been
+repeating to cynical youth the confessions of an amorous husband’s
+affection for his middle-aged and somewhat--” The Colonel in playful
+mood laid his hand upon the stranger’s shoulder, an action that
+necessitated his looking straight into the stranger’s eyes. The Colonel
+drew himself up stiffly and turned scarlet.
+
+Somebody was calling the Colonel a cad. Not only that, but was
+explaining quite clearly, so that the Colonel could see it for himself,
+why he was a cad.
+
+“That you and your wife lead a cat and dog existence is a disgrace to
+both of you. At least you might have the decency to try and hide it from
+the world--not make a jest of your shame to every passing stranger. You
+are a cad, sir, a cad!”
+
+Who was daring to say these things? Not the stranger, his lips had not
+moved. Besides, it was not his voice. Indeed it sounded much more like
+the voice of the Colonel himself. The Colonel looked from the stranger
+to his daughter, from his daughter back to the stranger. Clearly they
+had not heard the voice--a mere hallucination. The Colonel breathed
+again.
+
+Yet the impression remaining was not to be shaken off. Undoubtedly it
+was bad taste to have joked to the stranger upon such a subject. No
+gentleman would have done so.
+
+But then no gentleman would have permitted such a jest to be possible.
+No gentleman would be forever wrangling with his wife--certainly
+never in public. However irritating the woman, a gentleman would have
+exercised self-control.
+
+Mrs. Devine had risen, was coming slowly across the room. Fear laid
+hold of the Colonel. She was going to address some aggravating remark
+to him--he could see it in her eye--which would irritate him into savage
+retort.
+
+Even this prize idiot of a stranger would understand why boarding-house
+wits had dubbed them “Darby and Joan,” would grasp the fact that the
+gallant Colonel had thought it amusing, in conversation with a table
+acquaintance, to hold his own wife up to ridicule.
+
+“My dear,” cried the Colonel, hurrying to speak first, “does not this
+room strike you as cold? Let me fetch you a shawl.”
+
+It was useless: the Colonel felt it. It had been too long the custom of
+both of them to preface with politeness their deadliest insults to each
+other. She came on, thinking of a suitable reply: suitable from her
+point of view, that is. In another moment the truth would be out. A
+wild, fantastic possibility flashed through the Colonel’s brain: If to
+him, why not to her?
+
+“Letitia,” cried the Colonel, and the tone of his voice surprised her
+into silence, “I want you to look closely at our friend. Does he not
+remind you of someone?”
+
+Mrs. Devine, so urged, looked at the stranger long and hard. “Yes,” she
+murmured, turning to her husband, “he does, who is it?”
+
+“I cannot fix it,” replied the Colonel; “I thought that maybe you would
+remember.”
+
+“It will come to me,” mused Mrs. Devine. “It is someone--years ago,
+when I was a girl--in Devonshire. Thank you, if it isn’t troubling you,
+Harry. I left it in the dining-room.”
+
+It was, as Mr. Augustus Longcord explained to his partner Isidore,
+the colossal foolishness of the stranger that was the cause of all the
+trouble. “Give me a man, who can take care of himself--or thinks he
+can,” declared Augustus Longcord, “and I am prepared to give a good
+account of myself. But when a helpless baby refuses even to look at what
+you call your figures, tells you that your mere word is sufficient for
+him, and hands you over his cheque-book to fill up for yourself--well,
+it isn’t playing the game.”
+
+“Auguthuth,” was the curt comment of his partner, “you’re a fool.”
+
+“All right, my boy, you try,” suggested Augustus.
+
+“Jutht what I mean to do,” asserted his partner.
+
+“Well,” demanded Augustus one evening later, meeting Isidore ascending
+the stairs after a long talk with the stranger in the dining-room with
+the door shut.
+
+“Oh, don’t arth me,” retorted Isidore, “thilly ath, thath what he ith.”
+
+“What did he say?”
+
+“What did he thay! talked about the Jewth: what a grand rathe they
+were--how people mithjudged them: all that thort of rot.
+
+“Thaid thome of the motht honorable men he had ever met had been Jewth.
+Thought I wath one of ‘em!”
+
+“Well, did you get anything out of him?”
+
+“Get anything out of him. Of courthe not. Couldn’t very well thell the
+whole rathe, ath it were, for a couple of hundred poundth, after that.
+Didn’t theem worth it.”
+
+There were many things Forty-eight Bloomsbury Square came gradually
+to the conclusion were not worth the doing:--Snatching at the gravy;
+pouncing out of one’s turn upon the vegetables and helping oneself to
+more than one’s fair share; manoeuvering for the easy-chair; sitting on
+the evening paper while pretending not to have seen it--all such-like
+tiresome bits of business. For the little one made out of it, really
+it was not worth the bother. Grumbling everlastingly at one’s food;
+grumbling everlastingly at most things; abusing Pennycherry behind her
+back; abusing, for a change, one’s fellow-boarders; squabbling with
+one’s fellow-boarders about nothing in particular; sneering at one’s
+fellow-boarders; talking scandal of one’s fellow-boarders; making
+senseless jokes about one’s fellow-boarders; talking big about oneself,
+nobody believing one--all such-like vulgarities. Other boarding-houses
+might indulge in them: Forty-eight Bloomsbury Square had its dignity to
+consider.
+
+The truth is, Forty-eight Bloomsbury Square was coming to a very good
+opinion of itself: for the which not Bloomsbury Square so much as
+the stranger must be blamed. The stranger had arrived at Forty-eight
+Bloomsbury Square with the preconceived idea--where obtained from
+Heaven knows--that its seemingly commonplace, mean-minded, coarse-fibred
+occupants were in reality ladies and gentlemen of the first water; and
+time and observation had apparently only strengthened this absurd idea.
+The natural result was, Forty-eight Bloomsbury Square was coming round
+to the stranger’s opinion of itself.
+
+Mrs. Pennycherry, the stranger would persist in regarding as a lady born
+and bred, compelled by circumstances over which she had no control to
+fill an arduous but honorable position of middle-class society--a sort
+of foster-mother, to whom were due the thanks and gratitude of her
+promiscuous family; and this view of herself Mrs. Pennycherry now clung
+to with obstinate conviction. There were disadvantages attaching, but
+these Mrs. Pennycherry appeared prepared to suffer cheerfully. A lady
+born and bred cannot charge other ladies and gentlemen for coals and
+candles they have never burnt; a foster-mother cannot palm off upon her
+children New Zealand mutton for Southdown. A mere lodging-house-keeper
+can play these tricks, and pocket the profits. But a lady feels she
+cannot: Mrs. Pennycherry felt she no longer could.
+
+To the stranger Miss Kite was a witty and delightful conversationalist
+of most attractive personality. Miss Kite had one failing: it was lack
+of vanity. She was unaware of her own delicate and refined beauty. If
+Miss Kite could only see herself with his, the stranger’s eyes, the
+modesty that rendered her distrustful of her natural charms would fall
+from her. The stranger was so sure of it Miss Kite determined to put
+it to the test. One evening, an hour before dinner, there entered the
+drawing-room, when the stranger only was there and before the gas
+was lighted, a pleasant, good-looking lady, somewhat pale, with
+neatly-arranged brown hair, who demanded of the stranger if he knew her.
+All her body was trembling, and her voice seemed inclined to run away
+from her and become a sob. But when the stranger, looking straight into
+her eyes, told her that from the likeness he thought she must be Miss
+Kite’s younger sister, but much prettier, it became a laugh instead: and
+that evening the golden-haired Miss Kite disappeared never to show her
+high-coloured face again; and what perhaps, more than all else, might
+have impressed some former habitue of Forty-eight Bloomsbury Square
+with awe, it was that no one in the house made even a passing inquiry
+concerning her.
+
+Sir William’s cousin the stranger thought an acquisition to any
+boarding-house. A lady of high-class family! There was nothing outward
+or visible perhaps to tell you that she was of high-class family. She
+herself, naturally, would not mention the fact, yet somehow you felt
+it. Unconsciously she set a high-class tone, diffused an atmosphere of
+gentle manners. Not that the stranger had said this in so many words;
+Sir William’s cousin gathered that he thought it, and felt herself in
+agreement with him.
+
+For Mr. Longcord and his partner, as representatives of the best type
+of business men, the stranger had a great respect. With what unfortunate
+results to themselves has been noted. The curious thing is that the Firm
+appeared content with the price they had paid for the stranger’s good
+opinion--had even, it was rumoured, acquired a taste for honest men’s
+respect--that in the long run was likely to cost them dear. But we all
+have our pet extravagance.
+
+The Colonel and Mrs. Devine both suffered a good deal at first from
+the necessity imposed upon them of learning, somewhat late in life, new
+tricks. In the privacy of their own apartment they condoled with one
+another.
+
+“Tomfool nonsense,” grumbled the Colonel, “you and I starting billing
+and cooing at our age!”
+
+“What I object to,” said Mrs. Devine, “is the feeling that somehow I am
+being made to do it.”
+
+“The idea that a man and his wife cannot have their little joke together
+for fear of what some impertinent jackanapes may think of them! it’s
+damn ridiculous,” the Colonel exploded.
+
+“Even when he isn’t there,” said Mrs. Devine, “I seem to see him looking
+at me with those vexing eyes of his. Really the man quite haunts me.”
+
+“I have met him somewhere,” mused the Colonel, “I’ll swear I’ve met him
+somewhere. I wish to goodness he would go.”
+
+A hundred things a day the Colonel wanted to say to Mrs. Devine, a
+hundred things a day Mrs. Devine would have liked to observe to the
+Colonel. But by the time the opportunity occurred--when nobody else was
+by to hear--all interest in saying them was gone.
+
+“Women will be women,” was the sentiment with which the Colonel consoled
+himself. “A man must bear with them--must never forget that he is a
+gentleman.”
+
+“Oh, well, I suppose they’re all alike,” laughed Mrs. Devine to herself,
+having arrived at that stage of despair when one seeks refuge in
+cheerfulness. “What’s the use of putting oneself out--it does no good,
+and only upsets one.” There is a certain satisfaction in feeling you
+are bearing with heroic resignation the irritating follies of
+others. Colonel and Mrs. Devine came to enjoy the luxury of much
+self-approbation.
+
+But the person seriously annoyed by the stranger’s bigoted belief in
+the innate goodness of everyone he came across was the languid,
+handsome Miss Devine. The stranger would have it that Miss Devine was a
+noble-souled, high-minded young woman, something midway between a Flora
+Macdonald and a Joan of Arc. Miss Devine, on the contrary, knew herself
+to be a sleek, luxury-loving animal, quite willing to sell herself to
+the bidder who could offer her the finest clothes, the richest foods,
+the most sumptuous surroundings. Such a bidder was to hand in the person
+of a retired bookmaker, a somewhat greasy old gentleman, but exceedingly
+rich and undoubtedly fond of her.
+
+Miss Devine, having made up her mind that the thing had got to be done,
+was anxious that it should be done quickly. And here it was that
+the stranger’s ridiculous opinion of her not only irritated but
+inconvenienced her. Under the very eyes of a person--however
+foolish--convinced that you are possessed of all the highest attributes
+of your sex, it is difficult to behave as though actuated by only the
+basest motives. A dozen times had Miss Devine determined to end the
+matter by formal acceptance of her elderly admirer’s large and flabby
+hand, and a dozen times--the vision intervening of the stranger’s grave,
+believing eyes--had Miss Devine refused decided answer. The stranger
+would one day depart. Indeed, he had told her himself, he was but a
+passing traveller. When he was gone it would be easier. So she thought
+at the time.
+
+One afternoon the stranger entered the room where she was standing
+by the window, looking out upon the bare branches of the trees in
+Bloomsbury Square. She remembered afterwards, it was just such another
+foggy afternoon as the afternoon of the stranger’s arrival three months
+before. No one else was in the room. The stranger closed the door, and
+came towards her with that curious, quick-leaping step of his. His long
+coat was tightly buttoned, and in his hands he carried his old felt hat
+and the massive knotted stick that was almost a staff.
+
+“I have come to say good-bye,” explained the stranger. “I am going.”
+
+“I shall not see you again?” asked the girl.
+
+“I cannot say,” replied the stranger. “But you will think of me?”
+
+“Yes,” she answered with a smile, “I can promise that.”
+
+“And I shall always remember you,” promised the stranger, “and I wish
+you every joy--the joy of love, the joy of a happy marriage.”
+
+The girl winced. “Love and marriage are not always the same thing,” she
+said.
+
+“Not always,” agreed the stranger, “but in your case they will be one.”
+
+She looked at him.
+
+“Do you think I have not noticed?” smiled the stranger, “a gallant,
+handsome lad, and clever. You love him and he loves you. I could not
+have gone away without knowing it was well with you.”
+
+Her gaze wandered towards the fading light.
+
+“Ah, yes, I love him,” she answered petulantly. “Your eyes can see
+clearly enough, when they want to. But one does not live on love, in our
+world. I will tell you the man I am going to marry if you care to know.”
+ She would not meet his eyes. She kept her gaze still fixed upon the
+dingy trees, the mist beyond, and spoke rapidly and vehemently: “The man
+who can give me all my soul’s desire--money and the things that money
+can buy. You think me a woman, I’m only a pig. He is moist, and breathes
+like a porpoise; with cunning in place of a brain, and the rest of him
+mere stomach. But he is good enough for me.”
+
+She hoped this would shock the stranger and that now, perhaps, he would
+go. It irritated her to hear him only laugh.
+
+“No,” he said, “you will not marry him.”
+
+“Who will stop me?” she cried angrily.
+
+“Your Better Self.”
+
+His voice had a strange ring of authority, compelling her to turn and
+look upon his face. Yes, it was true, the fancy that from the very
+first had haunted her. She had met him, talked to him--in silent country
+roads, in crowded city streets, where was it? And always in talking
+with him her spirit had been lifted up: she had been--what he had always
+thought her.
+
+“There are those,” continued the stranger (and for the first time she
+saw that he was of a noble presence, that his gentle, child-like eyes
+could also command), “whose Better Self lies slain by their own hand
+and troubles them no more. But yours, my child, you have let grow too
+strong; it will ever be your master. You must obey. Flee from it and it
+will follow you; you cannot escape it. Insult it and it will chastise
+you with burning shame, with stinging self-reproach from day to day.”
+ The sternness faded from the beautiful face, the tenderness crept back.
+He laid his hand upon the young girl’s shoulder. “You will marry your
+lover,” he smiled. “With him you will walk the way of sunlight and of
+shadow.”
+
+And the girl, looking up into the strong, calm face, knew that it would
+be so, that the power of resisting her Better Self had passed away from
+her for ever.
+
+“Now,” said the stranger, “come to the door with me. Leave-takings
+are but wasted sadness. Let me pass out quietly. Close the door softly
+behind me.”
+
+She thought that perhaps he would turn his face again, but she saw
+no more of him than the odd roundness of his back under the tightly
+buttoned coat, before he faded into the gathering fog.
+
+Then softly she closed the door.
+
+
+
+
+
+End of the Project Gutenberg EBook of Passing of the Third Floor Back, by
+Jerome K. Jerome
+
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+    <title>
+      Passing of the Third Floor Back, by Jerome K. Jerome
+    </title>
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+<pre xml:space="preserve">
+
+Project Gutenberg's Passing of the Third Floor Back, by Jerome K. Jerome
+
+This eBook is for the use of anyone anywhere at no cost and with
+almost no restrictions whatsoever.  You may copy it, give it away or
+re-use it under the terms of the Project Gutenberg License included
+with this eBook or online at www.gutenberg.org
+
+
+Title: Passing of the Third Floor Back
+
+Author: Jerome K. Jerome
+
+Release Date: July 26, 2008 [EBook #865]
+Last Updated: October 8, 2016
+
+Language: English
+
+Character set encoding: UTF-8
+
+*** START OF THIS PROJECT GUTENBERG EBOOK PASSING OF THE THIRD FLOOR BACK ***
+
+
+
+
+Produced by Ron Burkey, Amy Thomte, and David Widger
+
+
+
+
+
+</pre>
+    <p>
+      <br /><br />
+    </p>
+    <h1>
+      PASSING OF THE THIRD FLOOR BACK
+    </h1>
+    <p>
+      <br />
+    </p>
+    <h2>
+      By Jerome K. Jerome
+    </h2>
+    <p>
+      <br /> <br />
+    </p>
+    <blockquote>
+      <p>
+        Author of &ldquo;Paul Kelver,&rdquo; &ldquo;Three Men in a Boat,&rdquo; etc., etc.
+      </p>
+      <p>
+        New York
+      </p>
+      <p>
+        Dodd, Mead &amp; Company
+      </p>
+      <p>
+        1909
+      </p>
+      <p>
+        Copyright, 1904, By Jerome K. Jerome
+      </p>
+      <p>
+        Copyright, 1908, By Dodd, Mead &amp; Company
+      </p>
+      <p>
+        Published, September, 1908
+      </p>
+    </blockquote>
+    <p>
+      <br /> <br />
+    </p>
+    <hr />
+    <p>
+      <br /> <br />
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      The neighbourhood of Bloomsbury Square towards four o&rsquo;clock of a November
+      afternoon is not so crowded as to secure to the stranger, of appearance
+      anything out of the common, immunity from observation. Tibb&rsquo;s boy,
+      screaming at the top of his voice that <i>she</i> was his honey, stopped
+      suddenly, stepped backwards on to the toes of a voluble young lady
+      wheeling a perambulator, and remained deaf, apparently, to the somewhat
+      personal remarks of the voluble young lady. Not until he had reached the
+      next corner&mdash;and then more as a soliloquy than as information to the
+      street&mdash;did Tibb&rsquo;s boy recover sufficient interest in his own affairs
+      to remark that <i>he</i> was her bee. The voluble young lady herself,
+      following some half-a-dozen yards behind, forgot her wrongs in
+      contemplation of the stranger&rsquo;s back. There was this that was peculiar
+      about the stranger&rsquo;s back: that instead of being flat it presented a
+      decided curve. &ldquo;It ain&rsquo;t a &lsquo;ump, and it don&rsquo;t look like kervitcher of the
+      spine,&rdquo; observed the voluble young lady to herself. &ldquo;Blimy if I don&rsquo;t
+      believe &lsquo;e&rsquo;s taking &lsquo;ome &lsquo;is washing up his back.&rdquo;
+     </p>
+    <p>
+      The constable at the corner, trying to seem busy doing nothing, noticed
+      the stranger&rsquo;s approach with gathering interest. &ldquo;That&rsquo;s an odd sort of a
+      walk of yours, young man,&rdquo; thought the constable. &ldquo;You take care you don&rsquo;t
+      fall down and tumble over yourself.&rdquo;
+     </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;Thought he was a young man,&rdquo; murmured the constable, the stranger having
+      passed him. &ldquo;He had a young face right enough.&rdquo;
+     </p>
+    <p>
+      The daylight was fading. The stranger, finding it impossible to read the
+      name of the street upon the corner house, turned back.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;Why, &lsquo;tis a young man,&rdquo; the constable told himself; &ldquo;a mere boy.&rdquo;
+     </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;I beg your pardon,&rdquo; said the stranger; &ldquo;but would you mind telling me my
+      way to Bloomsbury Square.&rdquo;
+     </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;This is Bloomsbury Square,&rdquo; explained the constable; &ldquo;leastways round the
+      corner is. What number might you be wanting?&rdquo;
+     </p>
+    <p>
+      The stranger took from the ticket pocket of his tightly buttoned overcoat
+      a piece of paper, unfolded it and read it out: &ldquo;Mrs. Pennycherry. Number
+      Forty-eight.&rdquo;
+     </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;Round to the left,&rdquo; instructed him the constable; &ldquo;fourth house. Been
+      recommended there?&rdquo;
+     </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;By&mdash;by a friend,&rdquo; replied the stranger. &ldquo;Thank you very much.&rdquo;
+     </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;Ah,&rdquo; muttered the constable to himself; &ldquo;guess you won&rsquo;t be calling him
+      that by the end of the week, young&mdash;&rdquo;
+     </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;Funny,&rdquo; added the constable, gazing after the retreating figure of the
+      stranger. &ldquo;Seen plenty of the other sex as looked young behind and old in
+      front. This cove looks young in front and old behind. Guess he&rsquo;ll look old
+      all round if he stops long at mother Pennycherry&rsquo;s: stingy old cat.&rdquo;
+     </p>
+    <p>
+      Constables whose beat included Bloomsbury Square had their reasons for not
+      liking Mrs. Pennycherry. Indeed it might have been difficult to discover
+      any human being with reasons for liking that sharp-featured lady. Maybe
+      the keeping of second-rate boarding houses in the neighbourhood of
+      Bloomsbury does not tend to develop the virtues of generosity and
+      amiability.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      Meanwhile the stranger, proceeding upon his way, had rung the bell of
+      Number Forty-eight. Mrs. Pennycherry, peeping from the area and catching a
+      glimpse, above the railings, of a handsome if somewhat effeminate
+      masculine face, hastened to readjust her widow&rsquo;s cap before the
+      looking-glass while directing Mary Jane to show the stranger, should he
+      prove a problematical boarder, into the dining-room, and to light the gas.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;And don&rsquo;t stop gossiping, and don&rsquo;t you take it upon yourself to answer
+      questions. Say I&rsquo;ll be up in a minute,&rdquo; were Mrs. Pennycherry&rsquo;s further
+      instructions, &ldquo;and mind you hide your hands as much as you can.&rdquo;
+     </p>
+    <p>
+      ***
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;What are you grinning at?&rdquo; demanded Mrs. Pennycherry, a couple of minutes
+      later, of the dingy Mary Jane.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;Wasn&rsquo;t grinning,&rdquo; explained the meek Mary Jane, &ldquo;was only smiling to
+      myself.&rdquo;
+     </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;What at?&rdquo;
+     </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;Dunno,&rdquo; admitted Mary Jane. But still she went on smiling.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;What&rsquo;s he like then?&rdquo; demanded Mrs. Pennycherry.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;&lsquo;E ain&rsquo;t the usual sort,&rdquo; was Mary Jane&rsquo;s opinion.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;Thank God for that,&rdquo; ejaculated Mrs. Pennycherry piously.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;Says &lsquo;e&rsquo;s been recommended, by a friend.&rdquo;
+     </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;By whom?&rdquo;
+     </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;By a friend. &lsquo;E didn&rsquo;t say no name.&rdquo; Mrs. Pennycherry pondered. &ldquo;He&rsquo;s not
+      the funny sort, is he?&rdquo;
+     </p>
+    <p>
+      Not that sort at all. Mary Jane was sure of it.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      Mrs. Pennycherry ascended the stairs still pondering. As she entered the
+      room the stranger rose and bowed. Nothing could have been simpler than the
+      stranger&rsquo;s bow, yet there came with it to Mrs. Pennycherry a rush of old
+      sensations long forgotten. For one brief moment Mrs. Pennycherry saw
+      herself an amiable well-bred lady, widow of a solicitor: a visitor had
+      called to see her. It was but a momentary fancy. The next instant Reality
+      reasserted itself. Mrs. Pennycherry, a lodging-house keeper, existing
+      precariously upon a daily round of petty meannesses, was prepared for
+      contest with a possible new boarder, who fortunately looked an
+      inexperienced young gentleman.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;Someone has recommended me to you,&rdquo; began Mrs. Pennycherry; &ldquo;may I ask
+      who?&rdquo;
+     </p>
+    <p>
+      But the stranger waved the question aside as immaterial.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;You might not remember&mdash;him,&rdquo; he smiled. &ldquo;He thought that I should
+      do well to pass the few months I am given&mdash;that I have to be in
+      London, here. You can take me in?&rdquo;
+     </p>
+    <p>
+      Mrs. Pennycherry thought that she would be able to take the stranger in.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;A room to sleep in,&rdquo; explained the stranger, &ldquo;&mdash;any room will do&mdash;with
+      food and drink sufficient for a man, is all that I require.&rdquo;
+     </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;For breakfast,&rdquo; began Mrs. Pennycherry, &ldquo;I always give&mdash;&rdquo;
+     </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;What is right and proper, I am convinced,&rdquo; interrupted the stranger.
+      &ldquo;Pray do not trouble to go into detail, Mrs. Pennycherry. With whatever it
+      is I shall be content.&rdquo;
+     </p>
+    <p>
+      Mrs. Pennycherry, puzzled, shot a quick glance at the stranger, but his
+      face, though the gentle eyes were smiling, was frank and serious.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;At all events you will see the room,&rdquo; suggested Mrs. Pennycherry, &ldquo;before
+      we discuss terms.&rdquo;
+     </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;Certainly,&rdquo; agreed the stranger. &ldquo;I am a little tired and shall be glad
+      to rest there.&rdquo;
+     </p>
+    <p>
+      Mrs. Pennycherry led the way upward; on the landing of the third floor,
+      paused a moment undecided, then opened the door of the back bedroom.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;It is very comfortable,&rdquo; commented the stranger.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;For this room,&rdquo; stated Mrs. Pennycherry, &ldquo;together with full board,
+      consisting of&mdash;&rdquo;
+     </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;Of everything needful. It goes without saying,&rdquo; again interrupted the
+      stranger with his quiet grave smile.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;I have generally asked,&rdquo; continued Mrs. Pennycherry, &ldquo;four pounds a week.
+      To you&mdash;&rdquo; Mrs. Pennycherry&rsquo;s voice, unknown to her, took to itself
+      the note of aggressive generosity&mdash;&ldquo;seeing you have been recommended
+      here, say three pounds ten.&rdquo;
+     </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;Dear lady,&rdquo; said the stranger, &ldquo;that is kind of you. As you have divined,
+      I am not a rich man. If it be not imposing upon you I accept your
+      reduction with gratitude.&rdquo;
+     </p>
+    <p>
+      Again Mrs. Pennycherry, familiar with the satirical method, shot a
+      suspicious glance upon the stranger, but not a line was there, upon that
+      smooth fair face, to which a sneer could for a moment have clung. Clearly
+      he was as simple as he looked.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;Gas, of course, extra.&rdquo;
+     </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;Of course,&rdquo; agreed the Stranger.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;Coals&mdash;&rdquo;
+     </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;We shall not quarrel,&rdquo; for a third time the stranger interrupted. &ldquo;You
+      have been very considerate to me as it is. I feel, Mrs. Pennycherry, I can
+      leave myself entirely in your hands.&rdquo;
+     </p>
+    <p>
+      The stranger appeared anxious to be alone. Mrs. Pennycherry, having put a
+      match to the stranger&rsquo;s fire, turned to depart. And at this point it was
+      that Mrs. Pennycherry, the holder hitherto of an unbroken record for
+      sanity, behaved in a manner she herself, five minutes earlier in her
+      career, would have deemed impossible&mdash;that no living soul who had
+      ever known her would have believed, even had Mrs. Pennycherry gone down
+      upon her knees and sworn it to them.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;Did I say three pound ten?&rdquo; demanded Mrs. Pennycherry of the stranger,
+      her hand upon the door. She spoke crossly. She was feeling cross, with the
+      stranger, with herself&mdash;particularly with herself.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;You were kind enough to reduce it to that amount,&rdquo; replied the stranger;
+      &ldquo;but if upon reflection you find yourself unable&mdash;&rdquo;
+     </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;I was making a mistake,&rdquo; said Mrs. Pennycherry, &ldquo;it should have been two
+      pound ten.&rdquo;
+     </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;I cannot&mdash;I will not accept such sacrifice,&rdquo; exclaimed the stranger;
+      &ldquo;the three pound ten I can well afford.&rdquo;
+     </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;Two pound ten are my terms,&rdquo; snapped Mrs. Pennycherry. &ldquo;If you are bent
+      on paying more, you can go elsewhere. You&rsquo;ll find plenty to oblige you.&rdquo;
+     </p>
+    <p>
+      Her vehemence must have impressed the stranger. &ldquo;We will not contend
+      further,&rdquo; he smiled. &ldquo;I was merely afraid that in the goodness of your
+      heart&mdash;&rdquo;
+     </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;Oh, it isn&rsquo;t as good as all that,&rdquo; growled Mrs. Pennycherry.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;I am not so sure,&rdquo; returned the stranger. &ldquo;I am somewhat suspicious of
+      you. But wilful woman must, I suppose, have her way.&rdquo;
+     </p>
+    <p>
+      The stranger held out his hand, and to Mrs. Pennycherry, at that moment,
+      it seemed the most natural thing in the world to take it as if it had been
+      the hand of an old friend and to end the interview with a pleasant laugh&mdash;though
+      laughing was an exercise not often indulged in by Mrs. Pennycherry.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      Mary Jane was standing by the window, her hands folded in front of her,
+      when Mrs. Pennycherry re-entered the kitchen. By standing close to the
+      window one caught a glimpse of the trees in Bloomsbury Square and through
+      their bare branches of the sky beyond.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;There&rsquo;s nothing much to do for the next half hour, till Cook comes back.
+      I&rsquo;ll see to the door if you&rsquo;d like a run out?&rdquo; suggested Mrs. Pennycherry.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;It would be nice,&rdquo; agreed the girl so soon as she had recovered power of
+      speech; &ldquo;it&rsquo;s just the time of day I like.&rdquo;
+     </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;Don&rsquo;t be longer than the half hour,&rdquo; added Mrs. Pennycherry.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      Forty-eight Bloomsbury Square, assembled after dinner in the drawing-room,
+      discussed the stranger with that freedom and frankness characteristic of
+      Forty-eight Bloomsbury Square, towards the absent.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;Not what I call a smart young man,&rdquo; was the opinion of Augustus Longcord,
+      who was something in the City.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;Thpeaking for mythelf,&rdquo; commented his partner Isidore, &ldquo;hav&rsquo;n&rsquo;th any uthe
+      for the thmart young man. Too many of him, ath it ith.&rdquo;
+     </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;Must be pretty smart if he&rsquo;s one too many for you,&rdquo; laughed his partner.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      There was this to be said for the repartee of Forty-eight Bloomsbury
+      Square: it was simple of construction and easy of comprehension.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;Well it made me feel good just looking at him,&rdquo; declared Miss Kite, the
+      highly coloured. &ldquo;It was his clothes, I suppose&mdash;made me think of
+      Noah and the ark&mdash;all that sort of thing.&rdquo;
+     </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;It would be clothes that would make you think&mdash;if anything,&rdquo; drawled
+      the languid Miss Devine. She was a tall, handsome girl, engaged at the
+      moment in futile efforts to recline with elegance and comfort combined
+      upon a horsehair sofa. Miss Kite, by reason of having secured the only
+      easy-chair, was unpopular that evening; so that Miss Devine&rsquo;s remark
+      received from the rest of the company more approbation than perhaps it
+      merited.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;Is that intended to be clever, dear, or only rude?&rdquo; Miss Kite requested
+      to be informed.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;Both,&rdquo; claimed Miss Devine.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;Myself? I must confess,&rdquo; shouted the tall young lady&rsquo;s father, commonly
+      called the Colonel, &ldquo;I found him a fool.&rdquo;
+     </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;I noticed you seemed to be getting on very well together,&rdquo; purred his
+      wife, a plump, smiling little lady.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;Possibly we were,&rdquo; retorted the Colonel. &ldquo;Fate has accustomed me to the
+      society of fools.&rdquo;
+     </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;Isn&rsquo;t it a pity to start quarrelling immediately after dinner, you two,&rdquo;
+       suggested their thoughtful daughter from the sofa, &ldquo;you&rsquo;ll have nothing
+      left to amuse you for the rest of the evening.&rdquo;
+     </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;He didn&rsquo;t strike me as a conversationalist,&rdquo; said the lady who was cousin
+      to a baronet; &ldquo;but he did pass the vegetables before he helped himself. A
+      little thing like that shows breeding.&rdquo;
+     </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;Or that he didn&rsquo;t know you and thought maybe you&rsquo;d leave him half a
+      spoonful,&rdquo; laughed Augustus the wit.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;What I can&rsquo;t make out about him&mdash;&rdquo; shouted the Colonel.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      The stranger entered the room.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      The Colonel, securing the evening paper, retired into a corner. The highly
+      coloured Kite, reaching down from the mantelpiece a paper fan, held it
+      coyly before her face. Miss Devine sat upright on the horse-hair sofa, and
+      rearranged her skirts.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;Know anything?&rdquo; demanded Augustus of the stranger, breaking the somewhat
+      remarkable silence.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      The stranger evidently did not understand. It was necessary for Augustus,
+      the witty, to advance further into that odd silence.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;What&rsquo;s going to pull off the Lincoln handicap? Tell me, and I&rsquo;ll go out
+      straight and put my shirt upon it.&rdquo;
+     </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;I think you would act unwisely,&rdquo; smiled the stranger; &ldquo;I am not an
+      authority upon the subject.&rdquo;
+     </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;Not! Why they told me you were Captain Spy of the <i>Sporting Life</i>&mdash;in
+      disguise.&rdquo;
+     </p>
+    <p>
+      It would have been difficult for a joke to fall more flat. Nobody laughed,
+      though why Mr. Augustus Longcord could not understand, and maybe none of
+      his audience could have told him, for at Forty-eight Bloomsbury Square Mr.
+      Augustus Longcord passed as a humorist. The stranger himself appeared
+      unaware that he was being made fun of.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;You have been misinformed,&rdquo; assured him the stranger.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;I beg your pardon,&rdquo; said Mr. Augustus Longcord.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;It is nothing,&rdquo; replied the stranger in his sweet low voice, and passed
+      on.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;Well what about this theatre,&rdquo; demanded Mr. Longcord of his friend and
+      partner; &ldquo;do you want to go or don&rsquo;t you?&rdquo; Mr. Longcord was feeling
+      irritable.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;Goth the ticketh&mdash;may ath well,&rdquo; thought Isidore.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;Damn stupid piece, I&rsquo;m told.&rdquo;
+     </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;Motht of them thupid, more or leth. Pity to wathte the ticketh,&rdquo; argued
+      Isidore, and the pair went out.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;Are you staying long in London?&rdquo; asked Miss Kite, raising her practised
+      eyes towards the stranger.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;Not long,&rdquo; answered the stranger. &ldquo;At least I do not know. It depends.&rdquo;
+     </p>
+    <p>
+      An unusual quiet had invaded the drawing-room of Forty-eight Bloomsbury
+      Square, generally noisy with strident voices about this hour. The Colonel
+      remained engrossed in his paper. Mrs. Devine sat with her plump white
+      hands folded on her lap, whether asleep or not it was impossible to say.
+      The lady who was cousin to a baronet had shifted her chair beneath the
+      gasolier, her eyes bent on her everlasting crochet work. The languid Miss
+      Devine had crossed to the piano, where she sat fingering softly the
+      tuneless keys, her back to the cold barely-furnished room.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;Sit down!&rdquo; commanded saucily Miss Kite, indicating with her fan the
+      vacant seat beside her. &ldquo;Tell me about yourself. You interest me.&rdquo; Miss
+      Kite adopted a pretty authoritative air towards all youthful-looking
+      members of the opposite sex. It harmonised with the peach complexion and
+      the golden hair, and fitted her about as well.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;I am glad of that,&rdquo; answered the stranger, taking the chair suggested. &ldquo;I
+      so wish to interest you.&rdquo;
+     </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;You&rsquo;re a very bold boy.&rdquo; Miss Kite lowered her fan, for the purpose of
+      glancing archly over the edge of it, and for the first time encountered
+      the eyes of the stranger looking into hers. And then it was that Miss Kite
+      experienced precisely the same curious sensation that an hour or so ago
+      had troubled Mrs. Pennycherry when the stranger had first bowed to her. It
+      seemed to Miss Kite that she was no longer the Miss Kite that, had she
+      risen and looked into it, the fly-blown mirror over the marble mantelpiece
+      would, she knew, have presented to her view; but quite another Miss Kite&mdash;a
+      cheerful, bright-eyed lady verging on middle age, yet still good-looking
+      in spite of her faded complexion and somewhat thin brown locks. Miss Kite
+      felt a pang of jealousy shoot through her; this middle-aged Miss Kite
+      seemed, on the whole, a more attractive lady. There was a wholesomeness, a
+      broadmindedness about her that instinctively drew one towards her. Not
+      hampered, as Miss Kite herself was, by the necessity of appearing to be
+      somewhere between eighteen and twenty-two, this other Miss Kite could talk
+      sensibly, even brilliantly: one felt it. A thoroughly &ldquo;nice&rdquo; woman this
+      other Miss Kite; the real Miss Kite, though envious, was bound to admit
+      it. Miss Kite wished to goodness she had never seen the woman. The glimpse
+      of her had rendered Miss Kite dissatisfied with herself.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;I am not a boy,&rdquo; explained the stranger; &ldquo;and I had no intention of being
+      bold.&rdquo;
+     </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;I know,&rdquo; replied Miss Kite. &ldquo;It was a silly remark. Whatever induced me
+      to make it, I can&rsquo;t think. Getting foolish in my old age, I suppose.&rdquo;
+     </p>
+    <p>
+      The stranger laughed. &ldquo;Surely you are not old.&rdquo;
+     </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;I&rsquo;m thirty-nine,&rdquo; snapped out Miss Kite. &ldquo;You don&rsquo;t call it young?&rdquo;
+     </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;I think it a beautiful age,&rdquo; insisted the stranger; &ldquo;young enough not to
+      have lost the joy of youth, old enough to have learnt sympathy.&rdquo;
+     </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;Oh, I daresay,&rdquo; returned Miss Kite, &ldquo;any age you&rsquo;d think beautiful. I&rsquo;m
+      going to bed.&rdquo; Miss Kite rose. The paper fan had somehow got itself
+      broken. She threw the fragments into the fire.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;It is early yet,&rdquo; pleaded the stranger, &ldquo;I was looking forward to a talk
+      with you.&rdquo;
+     </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;Well, you&rsquo;ll be able to look forward to it,&rdquo; retorted Miss Kite.
+      &ldquo;Good-night.&rdquo;
+     </p>
+    <p>
+      The truth was, Miss Kite was impatient to have a look at herself in the
+      glass, in her own room with the door shut. The vision of that other Miss
+      Kite&mdash;the clean-looking lady of the pale face and the brown hair had
+      been so vivid, Miss Kite wondered whether temporary forgetfulness might
+      not have fallen upon her while dressing for dinner that evening.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      The stranger, left to his own devices, strolled towards the loo table,
+      seeking something to read.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;You seem to have frightened away Miss Kite,&rdquo; remarked the lady who was
+      cousin to a baronet.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;It seems so,&rdquo; admitted the stranger.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;My cousin, Sir William Bosster,&rdquo; observed the crocheting lady, &ldquo;who
+      married old Lord Egham&rsquo;s niece&mdash;you never met the Eghams?&rdquo;
+     </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;Hitherto,&rdquo; replied the stranger, &ldquo;I have not had that pleasure.&rdquo;
+     </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;A charming family. Cannot understand&mdash;my cousin Sir William, I mean,
+      cannot understand my remaining here. &lsquo;My dear Emily&rsquo;&mdash;he says the
+      same thing every time he sees me: &lsquo;My dear Emily, how can you exist among
+      the sort of people one meets with in a boarding-house.&rsquo; But they amuse
+      me.&rdquo;
+     </p>
+    <p>
+      A sense of humour, agreed the stranger, was always of advantage.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;Our family on my mother&rsquo;s side,&rdquo; continued Sir William&rsquo;s cousin in her
+      placid monotone, &ldquo;was connected with the Tatton-Joneses, who when King
+      George the Fourth&mdash;&rdquo; Sir William&rsquo;s cousin, needing another reel of
+      cotton, glanced up, and met the stranger&rsquo;s gaze.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;I&rsquo;m sure I don&rsquo;t know why I&rsquo;m telling you all this,&rdquo; said Sir William&rsquo;s
+      cousin in an irritable tone. &ldquo;It can&rsquo;t possibly interest you.&rdquo;
+     </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;Everything connected with you interests me,&rdquo; gravely the stranger assured
+      her.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;It is very kind of you to say so,&rdquo; sighed Sir William&rsquo;s cousin, but
+      without conviction; &ldquo;I am afraid sometimes I bore people.&rdquo;
+     </p>
+    <p>
+      The polite stranger refrained from contradiction.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;You see,&rdquo; continued the poor lady, &ldquo;I really am of good family.&rdquo;
+     </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;Dear lady,&rdquo; said the stranger, &ldquo;your gentle face, your gentle voice, your
+      gentle bearing, all proclaim it.&rdquo;
+     </p>
+    <p>
+      She looked without flinching into the stranger&rsquo;s eyes, and gradually a
+      smile banished the reigning dulness of her features.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;How foolish of me.&rdquo; She spoke rather to herself than to the stranger.
+      &ldquo;Why, of course, people&mdash;people whose opinion is worth troubling
+      about&mdash;judge of you by what you are, not by what you go about saying
+      you are.&rdquo;
+     </p>
+    <p>
+      The stranger remained silent.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;I am the widow of a provincial doctor, with an income of just two hundred
+      and thirty pounds per annum,&rdquo; she argued. &ldquo;The sensible thing for me to do
+      is to make the best of it, and to worry myself about these high and mighty
+      relations of mine as little as they have ever worried themselves about
+      me.&rdquo;
+     </p>
+    <p>
+      The stranger appeared unable to think of anything worth saying.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;I have other connections,&rdquo; remembered Sir William&rsquo;s cousin; &ldquo;those of my
+      poor husband, to whom instead of being the &lsquo;poor relation&rsquo; I could be the
+      fairy god-mama. They are my people&mdash;or would be,&rdquo; added Sir William&rsquo;s
+      cousin tartly, &ldquo;if I wasn&rsquo;t a vulgar snob.&rdquo;
+     </p>
+    <p>
+      She flushed the instant she had said the words and, rising, commenced
+      preparations for a hurried departure.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;Now it seems I am driving you away,&rdquo; sighed the stranger.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;Having been called a &lsquo;vulgar snob,&rsquo;&rdquo; retorted the lady with some heat, &ldquo;I
+      think it about time I went.&rdquo;
+     </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;The words were your own,&rdquo; the stranger reminded her.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;Whatever I may have thought,&rdquo; remarked the indignant dame, &ldquo;no lady&mdash;least
+      of all in the presence of a total stranger&mdash;would have called herself&mdash;&rdquo;
+       The poor dame paused, bewildered. &ldquo;There is something very curious the
+      matter with me this evening, that I cannot understand,&rdquo; she explained, &ldquo;I
+      seem quite unable to avoid insulting myself.&rdquo;
+     </p>
+    <p>
+      Still surrounded by bewilderment, she wished the stranger good-night,
+      hoping that when next they met she would be more herself. The stranger,
+      hoping so also, opened the door and closed it again behind her.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;Tell me,&rdquo; laughed Miss Devine, who by sheer force of talent was
+      contriving to wring harmony from the reluctant piano, &ldquo;how did you manage
+      to do it? I should like to know.&rdquo;
+     </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;How did I do what?&rdquo; inquired the stranger.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;Contrive to get rid so quickly of those two old frumps?&rdquo;
+     </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;How well you play!&rdquo; observed the stranger. &ldquo;I knew you had genius for
+      music the moment I saw you.&rdquo;
+     </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;How could you tell?&rdquo;
+     </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;It is written so clearly in your face.&rdquo;
+     </p>
+    <p>
+      The girl laughed, well pleased. &ldquo;You seem to have lost no time in studying
+      my face.&rdquo;
+     </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;It is a beautiful and interesting face,&rdquo; observed the stranger.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      She swung round sharply on the stool and their eyes met.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;You can read faces?&rdquo;
+     </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;Yes.&rdquo;
+     </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;Tell me, what else do you read in mine?&rdquo;
+     </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;Frankness, courage&mdash;&rdquo;
+     </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;Ah, yes, all the virtues. Perhaps. We will take them for granted.&rdquo; It was
+      odd how serious the girl had suddenly become. &ldquo;Tell me the reverse side.&rdquo;
+     </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;I see no reverse side,&rdquo; replied the stranger. &ldquo;I see but a fair girl,
+      bursting into noble womanhood.&rdquo;
+     </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;And nothing else? You read no trace of greed, of vanity, of sordidness,
+      of&mdash;&rdquo; An angry laugh escaped her lips. &ldquo;And you are a reader of
+      faces!&rdquo;
+     </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;A reader of faces.&rdquo; The stranger smiled. &ldquo;Do you know what is written
+      upon yours at this very moment? A love of truth that is almost fierce,
+      scorn of lies, scorn of hypocrisy, the desire for all things pure,
+      contempt of all things that are contemptible&mdash;especially of such
+      things as are contemptible in woman. Tell me, do I not read aright?&rdquo;
+     </p>
+    <p>
+      I wonder, thought the girl, is that why those two others both hurried from
+      the room? Does everyone feel ashamed of the littleness that is in them
+      when looked at by those clear, believing eyes of yours?
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      The idea occurred to her: &ldquo;Papa seemed to have a good deal to say to you
+      during dinner. Tell me, what were you talking about?&rdquo;
+     </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;The military looking gentleman upon my left? We talked about your mother
+      principally.&rdquo;
+     </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;I am sorry,&rdquo; returned the girl, wishful now she had not asked the
+      question. &ldquo;I was hoping he might have chosen another topic for the first
+      evening!&rdquo;
+     </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;He did try one or two,&rdquo; admitted the stranger; &ldquo;but I have been about the
+      world so little, I was glad when he talked to me about himself. I feel we
+      shall be friends. He spoke so nicely, too, about Mrs. Devine.&rdquo;
+     </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;Indeed,&rdquo; commented the girl.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;He told me he had been married for twenty years and had never regretted
+      it but once!&rdquo;
+     </p>
+    <p>
+      Her black eyes flashed upon him, but meeting his, the suspicion died from
+      them. She turned aside to hide her smile.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;So he regretted it&mdash;once.&rdquo;
+     </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;Only once,&rdquo; explained the stranger, &ldquo;in a passing irritable mood. It was
+      so frank of him to admit it. He told me&mdash;I think he has taken a
+      liking to me. Indeed he hinted as much. He said he did not often get an
+      opportunity of talking to a man like myself&mdash;he told me that he and
+      your mother, when they travel together, are always mistaken for a
+      honeymoon couple. Some of the experiences he related to me were really
+      quite amusing.&rdquo; The stranger laughed at recollection of them&mdash;&ldquo;that
+      even here, in this place, they are generally referred to as &lsquo;Darby and
+      Joan.&rsquo;&rdquo;
+     </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;Yes,&rdquo; said the girl, &ldquo;that is true. Mr. Longcord gave them that name, the
+      second evening after our arrival. It was considered clever&mdash;but
+      rather obvious I thought myself.&rdquo;
+     </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;Nothing&mdash;so it seems to me,&rdquo; said the stranger, &ldquo;is more beautiful
+      than the love that has weathered the storms of life. The sweet, tender
+      blossom that flowers in the heart of the young&mdash;in hearts such as
+      yours&mdash;that, too, is beautiful. The love of the young for the young,
+      that is the beginning of life. But the love of the old for the old, that
+      is the beginning of&mdash;of things longer.&rdquo;
+     </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;You seem to find all things beautiful,&rdquo; the girl grumbled.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;But are not all things beautiful?&rdquo; demanded the stranger.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      The Colonel had finished his paper. &ldquo;You two are engaged in a very
+      absorbing conversation,&rdquo; observed the Colonel, approaching them.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;We were discussing Darbies and Joans,&rdquo; explained his daughter. &ldquo;How
+      beautiful is the love that has weathered the storms of life!&rdquo;
+     </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;Ah!&rdquo; smiled the Colonel, &ldquo;that is hardly fair. My friend has been
+      repeating to cynical youth the confessions of an amorous husband&rsquo;s
+      affection for his middle-aged and somewhat&mdash;&rdquo; The Colonel in playful
+      mood laid his hand upon the stranger&rsquo;s shoulder, an action that
+      necessitated his looking straight into the stranger&rsquo;s eyes. The Colonel
+      drew himself up stiffly and turned scarlet.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      Somebody was calling the Colonel a cad. Not only that, but was explaining
+      quite clearly, so that the Colonel could see it for himself, why he was a
+      cad.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;That you and your wife lead a cat and dog existence is a disgrace to both
+      of you. At least you might have the decency to try and hide it from the
+      world&mdash;not make a jest of your shame to every passing stranger. You
+      are a cad, sir, a cad!&rdquo;
+     </p>
+    <p>
+      Who was daring to say these things? Not the stranger, his lips had not
+      moved. Besides, it was not his voice. Indeed it sounded much more like the
+      voice of the Colonel himself. The Colonel looked from the stranger to his
+      daughter, from his daughter back to the stranger. Clearly they had not
+      heard the voice&mdash;a mere hallucination. The Colonel breathed again.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      Yet the impression remaining was not to be shaken off. Undoubtedly it was
+      bad taste to have joked to the stranger upon such a subject. No gentleman
+      would have done so.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      But then no gentleman would have permitted such a jest to be possible. No
+      gentleman would be forever wrangling with his wife&mdash;certainly never
+      in public. However irritating the woman, a gentleman would have exercised
+      self-control.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      Mrs. Devine had risen, was coming slowly across the room. Fear laid hold
+      of the Colonel. She was going to address some aggravating remark to him&mdash;he
+      could see it in her eye&mdash;which would irritate him into savage retort.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      Even this prize idiot of a stranger would understand why boarding-house
+      wits had dubbed them &ldquo;Darby and Joan,&rdquo; would grasp the fact that the
+      gallant Colonel had thought it amusing, in conversation with a table
+      acquaintance, to hold his own wife up to ridicule.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;My dear,&rdquo; cried the Colonel, hurrying to speak first, &ldquo;does not this room
+      strike you as cold? Let me fetch you a shawl.&rdquo;
+     </p>
+    <p>
+      It was useless: the Colonel felt it. It had been too long the custom of
+      both of them to preface with politeness their deadliest insults to each
+      other. She came on, thinking of a suitable reply: suitable from her point
+      of view, that is. In another moment the truth would be out. A wild,
+      fantastic possibility flashed through the Colonel&rsquo;s brain: If to him, why
+      not to her?
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;Letitia,&rdquo; cried the Colonel, and the tone of his voice surprised her into
+      silence, &ldquo;I want you to look closely at our friend. Does he not remind you
+      of someone?&rdquo;
+     </p>
+    <p>
+      Mrs. Devine, so urged, looked at the stranger long and hard. &ldquo;Yes,&rdquo; she
+      murmured, turning to her husband, &ldquo;he does, who is it?&rdquo;
+     </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;I cannot fix it,&rdquo; replied the Colonel; &ldquo;I thought that maybe you would
+      remember.&rdquo;
+     </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;It will come to me,&rdquo; mused Mrs. Devine. &ldquo;It is someone&mdash;years ago,
+      when I was a girl&mdash;in Devonshire. Thank you, if it isn&rsquo;t troubling
+      you, Harry. I left it in the dining-room.&rdquo;
+     </p>
+    <p>
+      It was, as Mr. Augustus Longcord explained to his partner Isidore, the
+      colossal foolishness of the stranger that was the cause of all the
+      trouble. &ldquo;Give me a man, who can take care of himself&mdash;or thinks he
+      can,&rdquo; declared Augustus Longcord, &ldquo;and I am prepared to give a good
+      account of myself. But when a helpless baby refuses even to look at what
+      you call your figures, tells you that your mere word is sufficient for
+      him, and hands you over his cheque-book to fill up for yourself&mdash;well,
+      it isn&rsquo;t playing the game.&rdquo;
+     </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;Auguthuth,&rdquo; was the curt comment of his partner, &ldquo;you&rsquo;re a fool.&rdquo;
+     </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;All right, my boy, you try,&rdquo; suggested Augustus.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;Jutht what I mean to do,&rdquo; asserted his partner.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;Well,&rdquo; demanded Augustus one evening later, meeting Isidore ascending the
+      stairs after a long talk with the stranger in the dining-room with the
+      door shut.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;Oh, don&rsquo;t arth me,&rdquo; retorted Isidore, &ldquo;thilly ath, thath what he ith.&rdquo;
+     </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;What did he say?&rdquo;
+     </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;What did he thay! talked about the Jewth: what a grand rathe they were&mdash;how
+      people mithjudged them: all that thort of rot.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;Thaid thome of the motht honorable men he had ever met had been Jewth.
+      Thought I wath one of &lsquo;em!&rdquo;
+     </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;Well, did you get anything out of him?&rdquo;
+     </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;Get anything out of him. Of courthe not. Couldn&rsquo;t very well thell the
+      whole rathe, ath it were, for a couple of hundred poundth, after that.
+      Didn&rsquo;t theem worth it.&rdquo;
+     </p>
+    <p>
+      There were many things Forty-eight Bloomsbury Square came gradually to the
+      conclusion were not worth the doing:&mdash;Snatching at the gravy;
+      pouncing out of one&rsquo;s turn upon the vegetables and helping oneself to more
+      than one&rsquo;s fair share; manoeuvering for the easy-chair; sitting on the
+      evening paper while pretending not to have seen it&mdash;all such-like
+      tiresome bits of business. For the little one made out of it, really it
+      was not worth the bother. Grumbling everlastingly at one&rsquo;s food; grumbling
+      everlastingly at most things; abusing Pennycherry behind her back;
+      abusing, for a change, one&rsquo;s fellow-boarders; squabbling with one&rsquo;s
+      fellow-boarders about nothing in particular; sneering at one&rsquo;s
+      fellow-boarders; talking scandal of one&rsquo;s fellow-boarders; making
+      senseless jokes about one&rsquo;s fellow-boarders; talking big about oneself,
+      nobody believing one&mdash;all such-like vulgarities. Other
+      boarding-houses might indulge in them: Forty-eight Bloomsbury Square had
+      its dignity to consider.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      The truth is, Forty-eight Bloomsbury Square was coming to a very good
+      opinion of itself: for the which not Bloomsbury Square so much as the
+      stranger must be blamed. The stranger had arrived at Forty-eight
+      Bloomsbury Square with the preconceived idea&mdash;where obtained from
+      Heaven knows&mdash;that its seemingly commonplace, mean-minded,
+      coarse-fibred occupants were in reality ladies and gentlemen of the first
+      water; and time and observation had apparently only strengthened this
+      absurd idea. The natural result was, Forty-eight Bloomsbury Square was
+      coming round to the stranger&rsquo;s opinion of itself.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      Mrs. Pennycherry, the stranger would persist in regarding as a lady born
+      and bred, compelled by circumstances over which she had no control to fill
+      an arduous but honorable position of middle-class society&mdash;a sort of
+      foster-mother, to whom were due the thanks and gratitude of her
+      promiscuous family; and this view of herself Mrs. Pennycherry now clung to
+      with obstinate conviction. There were disadvantages attaching, but these
+      Mrs. Pennycherry appeared prepared to suffer cheerfully. A lady born and
+      bred cannot charge other ladies and gentlemen for coals and candles they
+      have never burnt; a foster-mother cannot palm off upon her children New
+      Zealand mutton for Southdown. A mere lodging-house-keeper can play these
+      tricks, and pocket the profits. But a lady feels she cannot: Mrs.
+      Pennycherry felt she no longer could.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      To the stranger Miss Kite was a witty and delightful conversationalist of
+      most attractive personality. Miss Kite had one failing: it was lack of
+      vanity. She was unaware of her own delicate and refined beauty. If Miss
+      Kite could only see herself with his, the stranger&rsquo;s eyes, the modesty
+      that rendered her distrustful of her natural charms would fall from her.
+      The stranger was so sure of it Miss Kite determined to put it to the test.
+      One evening, an hour before dinner, there entered the drawing-room, when
+      the stranger only was there and before the gas was lighted, a pleasant,
+      good-looking lady, somewhat pale, with neatly-arranged brown hair, who
+      demanded of the stranger if he knew her. All her body was trembling, and
+      her voice seemed inclined to run away from her and become a sob. But when
+      the stranger, looking straight into her eyes, told her that from the
+      likeness he thought she must be Miss Kite&rsquo;s younger sister, but much
+      prettier, it became a laugh instead: and that evening the golden-haired
+      Miss Kite disappeared never to show her high-coloured face again; and what
+      perhaps, more than all else, might have impressed some former habitue of
+      Forty-eight Bloomsbury Square with awe, it was that no one in the house
+      made even a passing inquiry concerning her.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      Sir William&rsquo;s cousin the stranger thought an acquisition to any
+      boarding-house. A lady of high-class family! There was nothing outward or
+      visible perhaps to tell you that she was of high-class family. She
+      herself, naturally, would not mention the fact, yet somehow you felt it.
+      Unconsciously she set a high-class tone, diffused an atmosphere of gentle
+      manners. Not that the stranger had said this in so many words; Sir
+      William&rsquo;s cousin gathered that he thought it, and felt herself in
+      agreement with him.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      For Mr. Longcord and his partner, as representatives of the best type of
+      business men, the stranger had a great respect. With what unfortunate
+      results to themselves has been noted. The curious thing is that the Firm
+      appeared content with the price they had paid for the stranger&rsquo;s good
+      opinion&mdash;had even, it was rumoured, acquired a taste for honest men&rsquo;s
+      respect&mdash;that in the long run was likely to cost them dear. But we
+      all have our pet extravagance.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      The Colonel and Mrs. Devine both suffered a good deal at first from the
+      necessity imposed upon them of learning, somewhat late in life, new
+      tricks. In the privacy of their own apartment they condoled with one
+      another.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;Tomfool nonsense,&rdquo; grumbled the Colonel, &ldquo;you and I starting billing and
+      cooing at our age!&rdquo;
+     </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;What I object to,&rdquo; said Mrs. Devine, &ldquo;is the feeling that somehow I am
+      being made to do it.&rdquo;
+     </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;The idea that a man and his wife cannot have their little joke together
+      for fear of what some impertinent jackanapes may think of them! it&rsquo;s damn
+      ridiculous,&rdquo; the Colonel exploded.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;Even when he isn&rsquo;t there,&rdquo; said Mrs. Devine, &ldquo;I seem to see him looking
+      at me with those vexing eyes of his. Really the man quite haunts me.&rdquo;
+     </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;I have met him somewhere,&rdquo; mused the Colonel, &ldquo;I&rsquo;ll swear I&rsquo;ve met him
+      somewhere. I wish to goodness he would go.&rdquo;
+     </p>
+    <p>
+      A hundred things a day the Colonel wanted to say to Mrs. Devine, a hundred
+      things a day Mrs. Devine would have liked to observe to the Colonel. But
+      by the time the opportunity occurred&mdash;when nobody else was by to hear&mdash;all
+      interest in saying them was gone.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;Women will be women,&rdquo; was the sentiment with which the Colonel consoled
+      himself. &ldquo;A man must bear with them&mdash;must never forget that he is a
+      gentleman.&rdquo;
+     </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;Oh, well, I suppose they&rsquo;re all alike,&rdquo; laughed Mrs. Devine to herself,
+      having arrived at that stage of despair when one seeks refuge in
+      cheerfulness. &ldquo;What&rsquo;s the use of putting oneself out&mdash;it does no
+      good, and only upsets one.&rdquo; There is a certain satisfaction in feeling you
+      are bearing with heroic resignation the irritating follies of others.
+      Colonel and Mrs. Devine came to enjoy the luxury of much self-approbation.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      But the person seriously annoyed by the stranger&rsquo;s bigoted belief in the
+      innate goodness of everyone he came across was the languid, handsome Miss
+      Devine. The stranger would have it that Miss Devine was a noble-souled,
+      high-minded young woman, something midway between a Flora Macdonald and a
+      Joan of Arc. Miss Devine, on the contrary, knew herself to be a sleek,
+      luxury-loving animal, quite willing to sell herself to the bidder who
+      could offer her the finest clothes, the richest foods, the most sumptuous
+      surroundings. Such a bidder was to hand in the person of a retired
+      bookmaker, a somewhat greasy old gentleman, but exceedingly rich and
+      undoubtedly fond of her.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      Miss Devine, having made up her mind that the thing had got to be done,
+      was anxious that it should be done quickly. And here it was that the
+      stranger&rsquo;s ridiculous opinion of her not only irritated but inconvenienced
+      her. Under the very eyes of a person&mdash;however foolish&mdash;convinced
+      that you are possessed of all the highest attributes of your sex, it is
+      difficult to behave as though actuated by only the basest motives. A dozen
+      times had Miss Devine determined to end the matter by formal acceptance of
+      her elderly admirer&rsquo;s large and flabby hand, and a dozen times&mdash;the
+      vision intervening of the stranger&rsquo;s grave, believing eyes&mdash;had Miss
+      Devine refused decided answer. The stranger would one day depart. Indeed,
+      he had told her himself, he was but a passing traveller. When he was gone
+      it would be easier. So she thought at the time.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      One afternoon the stranger entered the room where she was standing by the
+      window, looking out upon the bare branches of the trees in Bloomsbury
+      Square. She remembered afterwards, it was just such another foggy
+      afternoon as the afternoon of the stranger&rsquo;s arrival three months before.
+      No one else was in the room. The stranger closed the door, and came
+      towards her with that curious, quick-leaping step of his. His long coat
+      was tightly buttoned, and in his hands he carried his old felt hat and the
+      massive knotted stick that was almost a staff.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;I have come to say good-bye,&rdquo; explained the stranger. &ldquo;I am going.&rdquo;
+     </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;I shall not see you again?&rdquo; asked the girl.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;I cannot say,&rdquo; replied the stranger. &ldquo;But you will think of me?&rdquo;
+     </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;Yes,&rdquo; she answered with a smile, &ldquo;I can promise that.&rdquo;
+     </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;And I shall always remember you,&rdquo; promised the stranger, &ldquo;and I wish you
+      every joy&mdash;the joy of love, the joy of a happy marriage.&rdquo;
+     </p>
+    <p>
+      The girl winced. &ldquo;Love and marriage are not always the same thing,&rdquo; she
+      said.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;Not always,&rdquo; agreed the stranger, &ldquo;but in your case they will be one.&rdquo;
+     </p>
+    <p>
+      She looked at him.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;Do you think I have not noticed?&rdquo; smiled the stranger, &ldquo;a gallant,
+      handsome lad, and clever. You love him and he loves you. I could not have
+      gone away without knowing it was well with you.&rdquo;
+     </p>
+    <p>
+      Her gaze wandered towards the fading light.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;Ah, yes, I love him,&rdquo; she answered petulantly. &ldquo;Your eyes can see clearly
+      enough, when they want to. But one does not live on love, in our world. I
+      will tell you the man I am going to marry if you care to know.&rdquo; She would
+      not meet his eyes. She kept her gaze still fixed upon the dingy trees, the
+      mist beyond, and spoke rapidly and vehemently: &ldquo;The man who can give me
+      all my soul&rsquo;s desire&mdash;money and the things that money can buy. You
+      think me a woman, I&rsquo;m only a pig. He is moist, and breathes like a
+      porpoise; with cunning in place of a brain, and the rest of him mere
+      stomach. But he is good enough for me.&rdquo;
+     </p>
+    <p>
+      She hoped this would shock the stranger and that now, perhaps, he would
+      go. It irritated her to hear him only laugh.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;No,&rdquo; he said, &ldquo;you will not marry him.&rdquo;
+     </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;Who will stop me?&rdquo; she cried angrily.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;Your Better Self.&rdquo;
+     </p>
+    <p>
+      His voice had a strange ring of authority, compelling her to turn and look
+      upon his face. Yes, it was true, the fancy that from the very first had
+      haunted her. She had met him, talked to him&mdash;in silent country roads,
+      in crowded city streets, where was it? And always in talking with him her
+      spirit had been lifted up: she had been&mdash;what he had always thought
+      her.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;There are those,&rdquo; continued the stranger (and for the first time she saw
+      that he was of a noble presence, that his gentle, child-like eyes could
+      also command), &ldquo;whose Better Self lies slain by their own hand and
+      troubles them no more. But yours, my child, you have let grow too strong;
+      it will ever be your master. You must obey. Flee from it and it will
+      follow you; you cannot escape it. Insult it and it will chastise you with
+      burning shame, with stinging self-reproach from day to day.&rdquo; The sternness
+      faded from the beautiful face, the tenderness crept back. He laid his hand
+      upon the young girl&rsquo;s shoulder. &ldquo;You will marry your lover,&rdquo; he smiled.
+      &ldquo;With him you will walk the way of sunlight and of shadow.&rdquo;
+     </p>
+    <p>
+      And the girl, looking up into the strong, calm face, knew that it would be
+      so, that the power of resisting her Better Self had passed away from her
+      for ever.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;Now,&rdquo; said the stranger, &ldquo;come to the door with me. Leave-takings are but
+      wasted sadness. Let me pass out quietly. Close the door softly behind me.&rdquo;
+     </p>
+    <p>
+      She thought that perhaps he would turn his face again, but she saw no more
+      of him than the odd roundness of his back under the tightly buttoned coat,
+      before he faded into the gathering fog.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      Then softly she closed the door.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      <br /><br />
+    </p>
+<pre xml:space="preserve">
+
+
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+</pre>
+  </body>
+</html>
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+Project Gutenberg's Passing of the Third Floor Back, by Jerome K. Jerome
+
+This eBook is for the use of anyone anywhere at no cost and with
+almost no restrictions whatsoever.  You may copy it, give it away or
+re-use it under the terms of the Project Gutenberg License included
+with this eBook or online at www.gutenberg.org
+
+
+Title: Passing of the Third Floor Back
+
+Author: Jerome K. Jerome
+
+Posting Date: July 26, 2008 [EBook #865]
+Release Date: April 1997
+
+Language: English
+
+Character set encoding: ASCII
+
+*** START OF THIS PROJECT GUTENBERG EBOOK PASSING OF THE THIRD FLOOR BACK ***
+
+
+
+
+Produced by Ron Burkey, and Amy Thomte
+
+
+
+
+
+PASSING OF THE THIRD FLOOR BACK
+
+By Jerome K. Jerome
+
+
+Author of "Paul Kelver," "Three Men in a Boat," etc., etc.
+
+New York
+
+Dodd, Mead & Company
+
+1909
+
+
+Copyright, 1904, By Jerome K. Jerome
+
+Copyright, 1908, By Dodd, Mead & Company
+
+Published, September, 1908
+
+
+
+The neighbourhood of Bloomsbury Square towards four o'clock of a
+November afternoon is not so crowded as to secure to the stranger, of
+appearance anything out of the common, immunity from observation. Tibb's
+boy, screaming at the top of his voice that _she_ was his honey, stopped
+suddenly, stepped backwards on to the toes of a voluble young lady
+wheeling a perambulator, and remained deaf, apparently, to the somewhat
+personal remarks of the voluble young lady. Not until he had reached
+the next corner--and then more as a soliloquy than as information to the
+street--did Tibb's boy recover sufficient interest in his own affairs to
+remark that _he_ was her bee. The voluble young lady herself, following
+some half-a-dozen yards behind, forgot her wrongs in contemplation
+of the stranger's back. There was this that was peculiar about the
+stranger's back: that instead of being flat it presented a decided
+curve. "It ain't a 'ump, and it don't look like kervitcher of the
+spine," observed the voluble young lady to herself. "Blimy if I don't
+believe 'e's taking 'ome 'is washing up his back."
+
+The constable at the corner, trying to seem busy doing nothing, noticed
+the stranger's approach with gathering interest. "That's an odd sort of
+a walk of yours, young man," thought the constable. "You take care you
+don't fall down and tumble over yourself."
+
+"Thought he was a young man," murmured the constable, the stranger
+having passed him. "He had a young face right enough."
+
+The daylight was fading. The stranger, finding it impossible to read the
+name of the street upon the corner house, turned back.
+
+"Why, 'tis a young man," the constable told himself; "a mere boy."
+
+"I beg your pardon," said the stranger; "but would you mind telling me
+my way to Bloomsbury Square."
+
+"This is Bloomsbury Square," explained the constable; "leastways round
+the corner is. What number might you be wanting?"
+
+The stranger took from the ticket pocket of his tightly buttoned
+overcoat a piece of paper, unfolded it and read it out: "Mrs.
+Pennycherry. Number Forty-eight."
+
+"Round to the left," instructed him the constable; "fourth house. Been
+recommended there?"
+
+"By--by a friend," replied the stranger. "Thank you very much."
+
+"Ah," muttered the constable to himself; "guess you won't be calling him
+that by the end of the week, young--"
+
+"Funny," added the constable, gazing after the retreating figure of the
+stranger. "Seen plenty of the other sex as looked young behind and old
+in front. This cove looks young in front and old behind. Guess he'll
+look old all round if he stops long at mother Pennycherry's: stingy old
+cat."
+
+Constables whose beat included Bloomsbury Square had their reasons for
+not liking Mrs. Pennycherry. Indeed it might have been difficult to
+discover any human being with reasons for liking that sharp-featured
+lady. Maybe the keeping of second-rate boarding houses in the
+neighbourhood of Bloomsbury does not tend to develop the virtues of
+generosity and amiability.
+
+Meanwhile the stranger, proceeding upon his way, had rung the bell of
+Number Forty-eight. Mrs. Pennycherry, peeping from the area and catching
+a glimpse, above the railings, of a handsome if somewhat effeminate
+masculine face, hastened to readjust her widow's cap before the
+looking-glass while directing Mary Jane to show the stranger, should he
+prove a problematical boarder, into the dining-room, and to light the
+gas.
+
+"And don't stop gossiping, and don't you take it upon yourself to answer
+questions. Say I'll be up in a minute," were Mrs. Pennycherry's further
+instructions, "and mind you hide your hands as much as you can."
+
+***
+
+"What are you grinning at?" demanded Mrs. Pennycherry, a couple of
+minutes later, of the dingy Mary Jane.
+
+"Wasn't grinning," explained the meek Mary Jane, "was only smiling to
+myself."
+
+"What at?"
+
+"Dunno," admitted Mary Jane. But still she went on smiling.
+
+"What's he like then?" demanded Mrs. Pennycherry.
+
+"'E ain't the usual sort," was Mary Jane's opinion.
+
+"Thank God for that," ejaculated Mrs. Pennycherry piously.
+
+"Says 'e's been recommended, by a friend."
+
+"By whom?"
+
+"By a friend. 'E didn't say no name." Mrs. Pennycherry pondered. "He's
+not the funny sort, is he?"
+
+Not that sort at all. Mary Jane was sure of it.
+
+Mrs. Pennycherry ascended the stairs still pondering. As she entered the
+room the stranger rose and bowed. Nothing could have been simpler than
+the stranger's bow, yet there came with it to Mrs. Pennycherry a rush of
+old sensations long forgotten. For one brief moment Mrs. Pennycherry saw
+herself an amiable well-bred lady, widow of a solicitor: a visitor
+had called to see her. It was but a momentary fancy. The next instant
+Reality reasserted itself. Mrs. Pennycherry, a lodging-house keeper,
+existing precariously upon a daily round of petty meannesses, was
+prepared for contest with a possible new boarder, who fortunately looked
+an inexperienced young gentleman.
+
+"Someone has recommended me to you," began Mrs. Pennycherry; "may I ask
+who?"
+
+But the stranger waved the question aside as immaterial.
+
+"You might not remember--him," he smiled. "He thought that I should do
+well to pass the few months I am given--that I have to be in London,
+here. You can take me in?"
+
+Mrs. Pennycherry thought that she would be able to take the stranger in.
+
+"A room to sleep in," explained the stranger, "--any room will do--with
+food and drink sufficient for a man, is all that I require."
+
+"For breakfast," began Mrs. Pennycherry, "I always give--"
+
+"What is right and proper, I am convinced," interrupted the stranger.
+"Pray do not trouble to go into detail, Mrs. Pennycherry. With whatever
+it is I shall be content."
+
+Mrs. Pennycherry, puzzled, shot a quick glance at the stranger, but his
+face, though the gentle eyes were smiling, was frank and serious.
+
+"At all events you will see the room," suggested Mrs. Pennycherry,
+"before we discuss terms."
+
+"Certainly," agreed the stranger. "I am a little tired and shall be glad
+to rest there."
+
+Mrs. Pennycherry led the way upward; on the landing of the third floor,
+paused a moment undecided, then opened the door of the back bedroom.
+
+"It is very comfortable," commented the stranger.
+
+"For this room," stated Mrs. Pennycherry, "together with full board,
+consisting of--"
+
+"Of everything needful. It goes without saying," again interrupted the
+stranger with his quiet grave smile.
+
+"I have generally asked," continued Mrs. Pennycherry, "four pounds a
+week. To you--" Mrs. Pennycherry's voice, unknown to her, took to itself
+the note of aggressive generosity--"seeing you have been recommended
+here, say three pounds ten."
+
+"Dear lady," said the stranger, "that is kind of you. As you have
+divined, I am not a rich man. If it be not imposing upon you I accept
+your reduction with gratitude."
+
+Again Mrs. Pennycherry, familiar with the satirical method, shot a
+suspicious glance upon the stranger, but not a line was there, upon
+that smooth fair face, to which a sneer could for a moment have clung.
+Clearly he was as simple as he looked.
+
+"Gas, of course, extra."
+
+"Of course," agreed the Stranger.
+
+"Coals--"
+
+"We shall not quarrel," for a third time the stranger interrupted. "You
+have been very considerate to me as it is. I feel, Mrs. Pennycherry, I
+can leave myself entirely in your hands."
+
+The stranger appeared anxious to be alone. Mrs. Pennycherry, having put
+a match to the stranger's fire, turned to depart. And at this point it
+was that Mrs. Pennycherry, the holder hitherto of an unbroken record
+for sanity, behaved in a manner she herself, five minutes earlier in her
+career, would have deemed impossible--that no living soul who had ever
+known her would have believed, even had Mrs. Pennycherry gone down upon
+her knees and sworn it to them.
+
+"Did I say three pound ten?" demanded Mrs. Pennycherry of the stranger,
+her hand upon the door. She spoke crossly. She was feeling cross, with
+the stranger, with herself--particularly with herself.
+
+"You were kind enough to reduce it to that amount," replied the
+stranger; "but if upon reflection you find yourself unable--"
+
+"I was making a mistake," said Mrs. Pennycherry, "it should have been
+two pound ten."
+
+"I cannot--I will not accept such sacrifice," exclaimed the stranger;
+"the three pound ten I can well afford."
+
+"Two pound ten are my terms," snapped Mrs. Pennycherry. "If you are bent
+on paying more, you can go elsewhere. You'll find plenty to oblige you."
+
+Her vehemence must have impressed the stranger. "We will not contend
+further," he smiled. "I was merely afraid that in the goodness of your
+heart--"
+
+"Oh, it isn't as good as all that," growled Mrs. Pennycherry.
+
+"I am not so sure," returned the stranger. "I am somewhat suspicious of
+you. But wilful woman must, I suppose, have her way."
+
+The stranger held out his hand, and to Mrs. Pennycherry, at that moment,
+it seemed the most natural thing in the world to take it as if it had
+been the hand of an old friend and to end the interview with a pleasant
+laugh--though laughing was an exercise not often indulged in by Mrs.
+Pennycherry.
+
+Mary Jane was standing by the window, her hands folded in front of her,
+when Mrs. Pennycherry re-entered the kitchen. By standing close to
+the window one caught a glimpse of the trees in Bloomsbury Square and
+through their bare branches of the sky beyond.
+
+"There's nothing much to do for the next half hour, till Cook comes
+back. I'll see to the door if you'd like a run out?" suggested Mrs.
+Pennycherry.
+
+"It would be nice," agreed the girl so soon as she had recovered power
+of speech; "it's just the time of day I like."
+
+"Don't be longer than the half hour," added Mrs. Pennycherry.
+
+Forty-eight Bloomsbury Square, assembled after dinner in the
+drawing-room, discussed the stranger with that freedom and frankness
+characteristic of Forty-eight Bloomsbury Square, towards the absent.
+
+"Not what I call a smart young man," was the opinion of Augustus
+Longcord, who was something in the City.
+
+"Thpeaking for mythelf," commented his partner Isidore, "hav'n'th any
+uthe for the thmart young man. Too many of him, ath it ith."
+
+"Must be pretty smart if he's one too many for you," laughed his
+partner.
+
+There was this to be said for the repartee of Forty-eight Bloomsbury
+Square: it was simple of construction and easy of comprehension.
+
+"Well it made me feel good just looking at him," declared Miss Kite, the
+highly coloured. "It was his clothes, I suppose--made me think of Noah
+and the ark--all that sort of thing."
+
+"It would be clothes that would make you think--if anything," drawled
+the languid Miss Devine. She was a tall, handsome girl, engaged at the
+moment in futile efforts to recline with elegance and comfort combined
+upon a horsehair sofa. Miss Kite, by reason of having secured the only
+easy-chair, was unpopular that evening; so that Miss Devine's remark
+received from the rest of the company more approbation than perhaps it
+merited.
+
+"Is that intended to be clever, dear, or only rude?" Miss Kite requested
+to be informed.
+
+"Both," claimed Miss Devine.
+
+"Myself? I must confess," shouted the tall young lady's father, commonly
+called the Colonel, "I found him a fool."
+
+"I noticed you seemed to be getting on very well together," purred his
+wife, a plump, smiling little lady.
+
+"Possibly we were," retorted the Colonel. "Fate has accustomed me to the
+society of fools."
+
+"Isn't it a pity to start quarrelling immediately after dinner, you
+two," suggested their thoughtful daughter from the sofa, "you'll have
+nothing left to amuse you for the rest of the evening."
+
+"He didn't strike me as a conversationalist," said the lady who was
+cousin to a baronet; "but he did pass the vegetables before he helped
+himself. A little thing like that shows breeding."
+
+"Or that he didn't know you and thought maybe you'd leave him half a
+spoonful," laughed Augustus the wit.
+
+"What I can't make out about him--" shouted the Colonel.
+
+The stranger entered the room.
+
+The Colonel, securing the evening paper, retired into a corner. The
+highly coloured Kite, reaching down from the mantelpiece a paper fan,
+held it coyly before her face. Miss Devine sat upright on the horse-hair
+sofa, and rearranged her skirts.
+
+"Know anything?" demanded Augustus of the stranger, breaking the
+somewhat remarkable silence.
+
+The stranger evidently did not understand. It was necessary for
+Augustus, the witty, to advance further into that odd silence.
+
+"What's going to pull off the Lincoln handicap? Tell me, and I'll go out
+straight and put my shirt upon it."
+
+"I think you would act unwisely," smiled the stranger; "I am not an
+authority upon the subject."
+
+"Not! Why they told me you were Captain Spy of the _Sporting Life_--in
+disguise."
+
+It would have been difficult for a joke to fall more flat. Nobody
+laughed, though why Mr. Augustus Longcord could not understand, and
+maybe none of his audience could have told him, for at Forty-eight
+Bloomsbury Square Mr. Augustus Longcord passed as a humorist. The
+stranger himself appeared unaware that he was being made fun of.
+
+"You have been misinformed," assured him the stranger.
+
+"I beg your pardon," said Mr. Augustus Longcord.
+
+"It is nothing," replied the stranger in his sweet low voice, and passed
+on.
+
+"Well what about this theatre," demanded Mr. Longcord of his friend
+and partner; "do you want to go or don't you?" Mr. Longcord was feeling
+irritable.
+
+"Goth the ticketh--may ath well," thought Isidore.
+
+"Damn stupid piece, I'm told."
+
+"Motht of them thupid, more or leth. Pity to wathte the ticketh," argued
+Isidore, and the pair went out.
+
+"Are you staying long in London?" asked Miss Kite, raising her practised
+eyes towards the stranger.
+
+"Not long," answered the stranger. "At least I do not know. It depends."
+
+An unusual quiet had invaded the drawing-room of Forty-eight Bloomsbury
+Square, generally noisy with strident voices about this hour. The
+Colonel remained engrossed in his paper. Mrs. Devine sat with her plump
+white hands folded on her lap, whether asleep or not it was impossible
+to say. The lady who was cousin to a baronet had shifted her chair
+beneath the gasolier, her eyes bent on her everlasting crochet work. The
+languid Miss Devine had crossed to the piano, where she sat fingering
+softly the tuneless keys, her back to the cold barely-furnished room.
+
+"Sit down!" commanded saucily Miss Kite, indicating with her fan the
+vacant seat beside her. "Tell me about yourself. You interest me." Miss
+Kite adopted a pretty authoritative air towards all youthful-looking
+members of the opposite sex. It harmonised with the peach complexion and
+the golden hair, and fitted her about as well.
+
+"I am glad of that," answered the stranger, taking the chair suggested.
+"I so wish to interest you."
+
+"You're a very bold boy." Miss Kite lowered her fan, for the purpose of
+glancing archly over the edge of it, and for the first time encountered
+the eyes of the stranger looking into hers. And then it was that Miss
+Kite experienced precisely the same curious sensation that an hour or so
+ago had troubled Mrs. Pennycherry when the stranger had first bowed to
+her. It seemed to Miss Kite that she was no longer the Miss Kite that,
+had she risen and looked into it, the fly-blown mirror over the marble
+mantelpiece would, she knew, have presented to her view; but quite
+another Miss Kite--a cheerful, bright-eyed lady verging on middle age,
+yet still good-looking in spite of her faded complexion and somewhat
+thin brown locks. Miss Kite felt a pang of jealousy shoot through her;
+this middle-aged Miss Kite seemed, on the whole, a more attractive
+lady. There was a wholesomeness, a broadmindedness about her that
+instinctively drew one towards her. Not hampered, as Miss Kite herself
+was, by the necessity of appearing to be somewhere between eighteen and
+twenty-two, this other Miss Kite could talk sensibly, even brilliantly:
+one felt it. A thoroughly "nice" woman this other Miss Kite; the real
+Miss Kite, though envious, was bound to admit it. Miss Kite wished to
+goodness she had never seen the woman. The glimpse of her had rendered
+Miss Kite dissatisfied with herself.
+
+"I am not a boy," explained the stranger; "and I had no intention of
+being bold."
+
+"I know," replied Miss Kite. "It was a silly remark. Whatever induced me
+to make it, I can't think. Getting foolish in my old age, I suppose."
+
+The stranger laughed. "Surely you are not old."
+
+"I'm thirty-nine," snapped out Miss Kite. "You don't call it young?"
+
+"I think it a beautiful age," insisted the stranger; "young enough not
+to have lost the joy of youth, old enough to have learnt sympathy."
+
+"Oh, I daresay," returned Miss Kite, "any age you'd think beautiful.
+I'm going to bed." Miss Kite rose. The paper fan had somehow got itself
+broken. She threw the fragments into the fire.
+
+"It is early yet," pleaded the stranger, "I was looking forward to a
+talk with you."
+
+"Well, you'll be able to look forward to it," retorted Miss Kite.
+"Good-night."
+
+The truth was, Miss Kite was impatient to have a look at herself in the
+glass, in her own room with the door shut. The vision of that other Miss
+Kite--the clean-looking lady of the pale face and the brown hair had
+been so vivid, Miss Kite wondered whether temporary forgetfulness might
+not have fallen upon her while dressing for dinner that evening.
+
+The stranger, left to his own devices, strolled towards the loo table,
+seeking something to read.
+
+"You seem to have frightened away Miss Kite," remarked the lady who was
+cousin to a baronet.
+
+"It seems so," admitted the stranger.
+
+"My cousin, Sir William Bosster," observed the crocheting lady, "who
+married old Lord Egham's niece--you never met the Eghams?"
+
+"Hitherto," replied the stranger, "I have not had that pleasure."
+
+"A charming family. Cannot understand--my cousin Sir William, I mean,
+cannot understand my remaining here. 'My dear Emily'--he says the same
+thing every time he sees me: 'My dear Emily, how can you exist among the
+sort of people one meets with in a boarding-house.' But they amuse me."
+
+A sense of humour, agreed the stranger, was always of advantage.
+
+"Our family on my mother's side," continued Sir William's cousin in her
+placid monotone, "was connected with the Tatton-Joneses, who when King
+George the Fourth--" Sir William's cousin, needing another reel of
+cotton, glanced up, and met the stranger's gaze.
+
+"I'm sure I don't know why I'm telling you all this," said Sir William's
+cousin in an irritable tone. "It can't possibly interest you."
+
+"Everything connected with you interests me," gravely the stranger
+assured her.
+
+"It is very kind of you to say so," sighed Sir William's cousin, but
+without conviction; "I am afraid sometimes I bore people."
+
+The polite stranger refrained from contradiction.
+
+"You see," continued the poor lady, "I really am of good family."
+
+"Dear lady," said the stranger, "your gentle face, your gentle voice,
+your gentle bearing, all proclaim it."
+
+She looked without flinching into the stranger's eyes, and gradually a
+smile banished the reigning dulness of her features.
+
+"How foolish of me." She spoke rather to herself than to the stranger.
+"Why, of course, people--people whose opinion is worth troubling
+about--judge of you by what you are, not by what you go about saying you
+are."
+
+The stranger remained silent.
+
+"I am the widow of a provincial doctor, with an income of just two
+hundred and thirty pounds per annum," she argued. "The sensible thing
+for me to do is to make the best of it, and to worry myself about these
+high and mighty relations of mine as little as they have ever worried
+themselves about me."
+
+The stranger appeared unable to think of anything worth saying.
+
+"I have other connections," remembered Sir William's cousin; "those of
+my poor husband, to whom instead of being the 'poor relation' I could
+be the fairy god-mama. They are my people--or would be," added Sir
+William's cousin tartly, "if I wasn't a vulgar snob."
+
+She flushed the instant she had said the words and, rising, commenced
+preparations for a hurried departure.
+
+"Now it seems I am driving you away," sighed the stranger.
+
+"Having been called a 'vulgar snob,'" retorted the lady with some heat,
+"I think it about time I went."
+
+"The words were your own," the stranger reminded her.
+
+"Whatever I may have thought," remarked the indignant dame, "no
+lady--least of all in the presence of a total stranger--would have
+called herself--" The poor dame paused, bewildered. "There is something
+very curious the matter with me this evening, that I cannot understand,"
+she explained, "I seem quite unable to avoid insulting myself."
+
+Still surrounded by bewilderment, she wished the stranger good-night,
+hoping that when next they met she would be more herself. The stranger,
+hoping so also, opened the door and closed it again behind her.
+
+"Tell me," laughed Miss Devine, who by sheer force of talent was
+contriving to wring harmony from the reluctant piano, "how did you
+manage to do it? I should like to know."
+
+"How did I do what?" inquired the stranger.
+
+"Contrive to get rid so quickly of those two old frumps?"
+
+"How well you play!" observed the stranger. "I knew you had genius for
+music the moment I saw you."
+
+"How could you tell?"
+
+"It is written so clearly in your face."
+
+The girl laughed, well pleased. "You seem to have lost no time in
+studying my face."
+
+"It is a beautiful and interesting face," observed the stranger.
+
+She swung round sharply on the stool and their eyes met.
+
+"You can read faces?"
+
+"Yes."
+
+"Tell me, what else do you read in mine?"
+
+"Frankness, courage--"
+
+"Ah, yes, all the virtues. Perhaps. We will take them for granted." It
+was odd how serious the girl had suddenly become. "Tell me the reverse
+side."
+
+"I see no reverse side," replied the stranger. "I see but a fair girl,
+bursting into noble womanhood."
+
+"And nothing else? You read no trace of greed, of vanity, of sordidness,
+of--" An angry laugh escaped her lips. "And you are a reader of faces!"
+
+"A reader of faces." The stranger smiled. "Do you know what is written
+upon yours at this very moment? A love of truth that is almost fierce,
+scorn of lies, scorn of hypocrisy, the desire for all things pure,
+contempt of all things that are contemptible--especially of such things
+as are contemptible in woman. Tell me, do I not read aright?"
+
+I wonder, thought the girl, is that why those two others both hurried
+from the room? Does everyone feel ashamed of the littleness that is in
+them when looked at by those clear, believing eyes of yours?
+
+The idea occurred to her: "Papa seemed to have a good deal to say to you
+during dinner. Tell me, what were you talking about?"
+
+"The military looking gentleman upon my left? We talked about your
+mother principally."
+
+"I am sorry," returned the girl, wishful now she had not asked the
+question. "I was hoping he might have chosen another topic for the first
+evening!"
+
+"He did try one or two," admitted the stranger; "but I have been about
+the world so little, I was glad when he talked to me about himself. I
+feel we shall be friends. He spoke so nicely, too, about Mrs. Devine."
+
+"Indeed," commented the girl.
+
+"He told me he had been married for twenty years and had never regretted
+it but once!"
+
+Her black eyes flashed upon him, but meeting his, the suspicion died
+from them. She turned aside to hide her smile.
+
+"So he regretted it--once."
+
+"Only once," explained the stranger, "in a passing irritable mood. It
+was so frank of him to admit it. He told me--I think he has taken a
+liking to me. Indeed he hinted as much. He said he did not often get an
+opportunity of talking to a man like myself--he told me that he and your
+mother, when they travel together, are always mistaken for a honeymoon
+couple. Some of the experiences he related to me were really quite
+amusing." The stranger laughed at recollection of them--"that even here,
+in this place, they are generally referred to as 'Darby and Joan.'"
+
+"Yes," said the girl, "that is true. Mr. Longcord gave them that name,
+the second evening after our arrival. It was considered clever--but
+rather obvious I thought myself."
+
+"Nothing--so it seems to me," said the stranger, "is more beautiful
+than the love that has weathered the storms of life. The sweet, tender
+blossom that flowers in the heart of the young--in hearts such as
+yours--that, too, is beautiful. The love of the young for the young,
+that is the beginning of life. But the love of the old for the old, that
+is the beginning of--of things longer."
+
+"You seem to find all things beautiful," the girl grumbled.
+
+"But are not all things beautiful?" demanded the stranger.
+
+The Colonel had finished his paper. "You two are engaged in a very
+absorbing conversation," observed the Colonel, approaching them.
+
+"We were discussing Darbies and Joans," explained his daughter. "How
+beautiful is the love that has weathered the storms of life!"
+
+"Ah!" smiled the Colonel, "that is hardly fair. My friend has been
+repeating to cynical youth the confessions of an amorous husband's
+affection for his middle-aged and somewhat--" The Colonel in playful
+mood laid his hand upon the stranger's shoulder, an action that
+necessitated his looking straight into the stranger's eyes. The Colonel
+drew himself up stiffly and turned scarlet.
+
+Somebody was calling the Colonel a cad. Not only that, but was
+explaining quite clearly, so that the Colonel could see it for himself,
+why he was a cad.
+
+"That you and your wife lead a cat and dog existence is a disgrace to
+both of you. At least you might have the decency to try and hide it from
+the world--not make a jest of your shame to every passing stranger. You
+are a cad, sir, a cad!"
+
+Who was daring to say these things? Not the stranger, his lips had not
+moved. Besides, it was not his voice. Indeed it sounded much more like
+the voice of the Colonel himself. The Colonel looked from the stranger
+to his daughter, from his daughter back to the stranger. Clearly they
+had not heard the voice--a mere hallucination. The Colonel breathed
+again.
+
+Yet the impression remaining was not to be shaken off. Undoubtedly it
+was bad taste to have joked to the stranger upon such a subject. No
+gentleman would have done so.
+
+But then no gentleman would have permitted such a jest to be possible.
+No gentleman would be forever wrangling with his wife--certainly
+never in public. However irritating the woman, a gentleman would have
+exercised self-control.
+
+Mrs. Devine had risen, was coming slowly across the room. Fear laid
+hold of the Colonel. She was going to address some aggravating remark
+to him--he could see it in her eye--which would irritate him into savage
+retort.
+
+Even this prize idiot of a stranger would understand why boarding-house
+wits had dubbed them "Darby and Joan," would grasp the fact that the
+gallant Colonel had thought it amusing, in conversation with a table
+acquaintance, to hold his own wife up to ridicule.
+
+"My dear," cried the Colonel, hurrying to speak first, "does not this
+room strike you as cold? Let me fetch you a shawl."
+
+It was useless: the Colonel felt it. It had been too long the custom of
+both of them to preface with politeness their deadliest insults to each
+other. She came on, thinking of a suitable reply: suitable from her
+point of view, that is. In another moment the truth would be out. A
+wild, fantastic possibility flashed through the Colonel's brain: If to
+him, why not to her?
+
+"Letitia," cried the Colonel, and the tone of his voice surprised her
+into silence, "I want you to look closely at our friend. Does he not
+remind you of someone?"
+
+Mrs. Devine, so urged, looked at the stranger long and hard. "Yes," she
+murmured, turning to her husband, "he does, who is it?"
+
+"I cannot fix it," replied the Colonel; "I thought that maybe you would
+remember."
+
+"It will come to me," mused Mrs. Devine. "It is someone--years ago,
+when I was a girl--in Devonshire. Thank you, if it isn't troubling you,
+Harry. I left it in the dining-room."
+
+It was, as Mr. Augustus Longcord explained to his partner Isidore,
+the colossal foolishness of the stranger that was the cause of all the
+trouble. "Give me a man, who can take care of himself--or thinks he
+can," declared Augustus Longcord, "and I am prepared to give a good
+account of myself. But when a helpless baby refuses even to look at what
+you call your figures, tells you that your mere word is sufficient for
+him, and hands you over his cheque-book to fill up for yourself--well,
+it isn't playing the game."
+
+"Auguthuth," was the curt comment of his partner, "you're a fool."
+
+"All right, my boy, you try," suggested Augustus.
+
+"Jutht what I mean to do," asserted his partner.
+
+"Well," demanded Augustus one evening later, meeting Isidore ascending
+the stairs after a long talk with the stranger in the dining-room with
+the door shut.
+
+"Oh, don't arth me," retorted Isidore, "thilly ath, thath what he ith."
+
+"What did he say?"
+
+"What did he thay! talked about the Jewth: what a grand rathe they
+were--how people mithjudged them: all that thort of rot.
+
+"Thaid thome of the motht honorable men he had ever met had been Jewth.
+Thought I wath one of 'em!"
+
+"Well, did you get anything out of him?"
+
+"Get anything out of him. Of courthe not. Couldn't very well thell the
+whole rathe, ath it were, for a couple of hundred poundth, after that.
+Didn't theem worth it."
+
+There were many things Forty-eight Bloomsbury Square came gradually
+to the conclusion were not worth the doing:--Snatching at the gravy;
+pouncing out of one's turn upon the vegetables and helping oneself to
+more than one's fair share; manoeuvering for the easy-chair; sitting on
+the evening paper while pretending not to have seen it--all such-like
+tiresome bits of business. For the little one made out of it, really
+it was not worth the bother. Grumbling everlastingly at one's food;
+grumbling everlastingly at most things; abusing Pennycherry behind her
+back; abusing, for a change, one's fellow-boarders; squabbling with
+one's fellow-boarders about nothing in particular; sneering at one's
+fellow-boarders; talking scandal of one's fellow-boarders; making
+senseless jokes about one's fellow-boarders; talking big about oneself,
+nobody believing one--all such-like vulgarities. Other boarding-houses
+might indulge in them: Forty-eight Bloomsbury Square had its dignity to
+consider.
+
+The truth is, Forty-eight Bloomsbury Square was coming to a very good
+opinion of itself: for the which not Bloomsbury Square so much as
+the stranger must be blamed. The stranger had arrived at Forty-eight
+Bloomsbury Square with the preconceived idea--where obtained from
+Heaven knows--that its seemingly commonplace, mean-minded, coarse-fibred
+occupants were in reality ladies and gentlemen of the first water; and
+time and observation had apparently only strengthened this absurd idea.
+The natural result was, Forty-eight Bloomsbury Square was coming round
+to the stranger's opinion of itself.
+
+Mrs. Pennycherry, the stranger would persist in regarding as a lady born
+and bred, compelled by circumstances over which she had no control to
+fill an arduous but honorable position of middle-class society--a sort
+of foster-mother, to whom were due the thanks and gratitude of her
+promiscuous family; and this view of herself Mrs. Pennycherry now clung
+to with obstinate conviction. There were disadvantages attaching, but
+these Mrs. Pennycherry appeared prepared to suffer cheerfully. A lady
+born and bred cannot charge other ladies and gentlemen for coals and
+candles they have never burnt; a foster-mother cannot palm off upon her
+children New Zealand mutton for Southdown. A mere lodging-house-keeper
+can play these tricks, and pocket the profits. But a lady feels she
+cannot: Mrs. Pennycherry felt she no longer could.
+
+To the stranger Miss Kite was a witty and delightful conversationalist
+of most attractive personality. Miss Kite had one failing: it was lack
+of vanity. She was unaware of her own delicate and refined beauty. If
+Miss Kite could only see herself with his, the stranger's eyes, the
+modesty that rendered her distrustful of her natural charms would fall
+from her. The stranger was so sure of it Miss Kite determined to put
+it to the test. One evening, an hour before dinner, there entered the
+drawing-room, when the stranger only was there and before the gas
+was lighted, a pleasant, good-looking lady, somewhat pale, with
+neatly-arranged brown hair, who demanded of the stranger if he knew her.
+All her body was trembling, and her voice seemed inclined to run away
+from her and become a sob. But when the stranger, looking straight into
+her eyes, told her that from the likeness he thought she must be Miss
+Kite's younger sister, but much prettier, it became a laugh instead: and
+that evening the golden-haired Miss Kite disappeared never to show her
+high-coloured face again; and what perhaps, more than all else, might
+have impressed some former habitue of Forty-eight Bloomsbury Square
+with awe, it was that no one in the house made even a passing inquiry
+concerning her.
+
+Sir William's cousin the stranger thought an acquisition to any
+boarding-house. A lady of high-class family! There was nothing outward
+or visible perhaps to tell you that she was of high-class family. She
+herself, naturally, would not mention the fact, yet somehow you felt
+it. Unconsciously she set a high-class tone, diffused an atmosphere of
+gentle manners. Not that the stranger had said this in so many words;
+Sir William's cousin gathered that he thought it, and felt herself in
+agreement with him.
+
+For Mr. Longcord and his partner, as representatives of the best type
+of business men, the stranger had a great respect. With what unfortunate
+results to themselves has been noted. The curious thing is that the Firm
+appeared content with the price they had paid for the stranger's good
+opinion--had even, it was rumoured, acquired a taste for honest men's
+respect--that in the long run was likely to cost them dear. But we all
+have our pet extravagance.
+
+The Colonel and Mrs. Devine both suffered a good deal at first from
+the necessity imposed upon them of learning, somewhat late in life, new
+tricks. In the privacy of their own apartment they condoled with one
+another.
+
+"Tomfool nonsense," grumbled the Colonel, "you and I starting billing
+and cooing at our age!"
+
+"What I object to," said Mrs. Devine, "is the feeling that somehow I am
+being made to do it."
+
+"The idea that a man and his wife cannot have their little joke together
+for fear of what some impertinent jackanapes may think of them! it's
+damn ridiculous," the Colonel exploded.
+
+"Even when he isn't there," said Mrs. Devine, "I seem to see him looking
+at me with those vexing eyes of his. Really the man quite haunts me."
+
+"I have met him somewhere," mused the Colonel, "I'll swear I've met him
+somewhere. I wish to goodness he would go."
+
+A hundred things a day the Colonel wanted to say to Mrs. Devine, a
+hundred things a day Mrs. Devine would have liked to observe to the
+Colonel. But by the time the opportunity occurred--when nobody else was
+by to hear--all interest in saying them was gone.
+
+"Women will be women," was the sentiment with which the Colonel consoled
+himself. "A man must bear with them--must never forget that he is a
+gentleman."
+
+"Oh, well, I suppose they're all alike," laughed Mrs. Devine to herself,
+having arrived at that stage of despair when one seeks refuge in
+cheerfulness. "What's the use of putting oneself out--it does no good,
+and only upsets one." There is a certain satisfaction in feeling you
+are bearing with heroic resignation the irritating follies of
+others. Colonel and Mrs. Devine came to enjoy the luxury of much
+self-approbation.
+
+But the person seriously annoyed by the stranger's bigoted belief in
+the innate goodness of everyone he came across was the languid,
+handsome Miss Devine. The stranger would have it that Miss Devine was a
+noble-souled, high-minded young woman, something midway between a Flora
+Macdonald and a Joan of Arc. Miss Devine, on the contrary, knew herself
+to be a sleek, luxury-loving animal, quite willing to sell herself to
+the bidder who could offer her the finest clothes, the richest foods,
+the most sumptuous surroundings. Such a bidder was to hand in the person
+of a retired bookmaker, a somewhat greasy old gentleman, but exceedingly
+rich and undoubtedly fond of her.
+
+Miss Devine, having made up her mind that the thing had got to be done,
+was anxious that it should be done quickly. And here it was that
+the stranger's ridiculous opinion of her not only irritated but
+inconvenienced her. Under the very eyes of a person--however
+foolish--convinced that you are possessed of all the highest attributes
+of your sex, it is difficult to behave as though actuated by only the
+basest motives. A dozen times had Miss Devine determined to end the
+matter by formal acceptance of her elderly admirer's large and flabby
+hand, and a dozen times--the vision intervening of the stranger's grave,
+believing eyes--had Miss Devine refused decided answer. The stranger
+would one day depart. Indeed, he had told her himself, he was but a
+passing traveller. When he was gone it would be easier. So she thought
+at the time.
+
+One afternoon the stranger entered the room where she was standing
+by the window, looking out upon the bare branches of the trees in
+Bloomsbury Square. She remembered afterwards, it was just such another
+foggy afternoon as the afternoon of the stranger's arrival three months
+before. No one else was in the room. The stranger closed the door, and
+came towards her with that curious, quick-leaping step of his. His long
+coat was tightly buttoned, and in his hands he carried his old felt hat
+and the massive knotted stick that was almost a staff.
+
+"I have come to say good-bye," explained the stranger. "I am going."
+
+"I shall not see you again?" asked the girl.
+
+"I cannot say," replied the stranger. "But you will think of me?"
+
+"Yes," she answered with a smile, "I can promise that."
+
+"And I shall always remember you," promised the stranger, "and I wish
+you every joy--the joy of love, the joy of a happy marriage."
+
+The girl winced. "Love and marriage are not always the same thing," she
+said.
+
+"Not always," agreed the stranger, "but in your case they will be one."
+
+She looked at him.
+
+"Do you think I have not noticed?" smiled the stranger, "a gallant,
+handsome lad, and clever. You love him and he loves you. I could not
+have gone away without knowing it was well with you."
+
+Her gaze wandered towards the fading light.
+
+"Ah, yes, I love him," she answered petulantly. "Your eyes can see
+clearly enough, when they want to. But one does not live on love, in our
+world. I will tell you the man I am going to marry if you care to know."
+She would not meet his eyes. She kept her gaze still fixed upon the
+dingy trees, the mist beyond, and spoke rapidly and vehemently: "The man
+who can give me all my soul's desire--money and the things that money
+can buy. You think me a woman, I'm only a pig. He is moist, and breathes
+like a porpoise; with cunning in place of a brain, and the rest of him
+mere stomach. But he is good enough for me."
+
+She hoped this would shock the stranger and that now, perhaps, he would
+go. It irritated her to hear him only laugh.
+
+"No," he said, "you will not marry him."
+
+"Who will stop me?" she cried angrily.
+
+"Your Better Self."
+
+His voice had a strange ring of authority, compelling her to turn and
+look upon his face. Yes, it was true, the fancy that from the very
+first had haunted her. She had met him, talked to him--in silent country
+roads, in crowded city streets, where was it? And always in talking
+with him her spirit had been lifted up: she had been--what he had always
+thought her.
+
+"There are those," continued the stranger (and for the first time she
+saw that he was of a noble presence, that his gentle, child-like eyes
+could also command), "whose Better Self lies slain by their own hand
+and troubles them no more. But yours, my child, you have let grow too
+strong; it will ever be your master. You must obey. Flee from it and it
+will follow you; you cannot escape it. Insult it and it will chastise
+you with burning shame, with stinging self-reproach from day to day."
+The sternness faded from the beautiful face, the tenderness crept back.
+He laid his hand upon the young girl's shoulder. "You will marry your
+lover," he smiled. "With him you will walk the way of sunlight and of
+shadow."
+
+And the girl, looking up into the strong, calm face, knew that it would
+be so, that the power of resisting her Better Self had passed away from
+her for ever.
+
+"Now," said the stranger, "come to the door with me. Leave-takings
+are but wasted sadness. Let me pass out quietly. Close the door softly
+behind me."
+
+She thought that perhaps he would turn his face again, but she saw
+no more of him than the odd roundness of his back under the tightly
+buttoned coat, before he faded into the gathering fog.
+
+Then softly she closed the door.
+
+
+
+
+
+End of the Project Gutenberg EBook of Passing of the Third Floor Back, by 
+Jerome K. Jerome
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