all the time I couldn't seem to think about anything except how
perfectly awful it was that a _stranger_ like me should be running
round loose in the world, carrying all the big, scary secrets of a man
who didn't even know where I was. And then it came to me all of a
sudden, one rather worrisome day, that no woman who knew as much about
a man as I did was exactly a 'stranger' to him. And then, twice as
suddenly, to great, grown-up, cool-blooded, money-staled, book-tamed
_me_--it swept over me like a cyclone that I should never be able to
decide anything more in all my life--not the width of a tinsel ribbon,
not the goal of a journey, not the worth of a lover--until I'd seen
the Face that belonged to the Voice in the railroad wreck.

"And I sat down--and wrote the man a letter--I had his name and
address, you know. And there--in a rather maddening moonlight night on
the Caspian Sea--all the horrors and terrors of that other--Canadian
night came back to me and swamped completely all the arid timidity
and sleek conventionality that women like me are hidebound with
all their lives, and I wrote him--that unknown, unvisualized,
unimagined--MAN--the utterly free, utterly frank, utterly
honest sort of letter that any brave soul would write any other brave
soul--every day of the world--if there wasn't any flesh. It wasn't a
love letter. It wasn't even a sentimental letter. Never mind what I
told him. Never mind anything except that there, in that tropical
night on a moonlit sea, I asked him to meet me here, in Boston, eight
months afterward--on the same Boston-bound Canadian train--on
this--the anniversary of our other tragic meeting."

"And you think he'll be at the station?" gasped the Traveling
Salesman.