XIV.

To have got that sillily superfluous note to Verrian without any one's
knowing besides, Miss Shirley must have stolen to his door herself and
slipped it under. In order to do this unsuspected and unseen, she must
have found out in some sort that would not give her away which his room
was, and then watched her chance. It all argued a pervasiveness in her,
after such a brief sojourn in the house, and a mastery of finesse that he
did not like, though, he reflected, he was not authorized to like or
dislike anything about her. He was thirty-seven years old, and he had
not lived through that time, with his mother at his elbow to suggest
inferences from facts, without being versed in wiles which, even when
they were honest, were always wiles, and in lures which, when they were
of the most gossamer tenuity, were yet of texture close enough to make
the man who blundered through them aware that they had been thrown across
his path. He understood, of course, that they were sometimes helplessly
thrown across it, and were mere expressions of abstract woman with
relation to abstract man, but that did not change their nature. He did
not abhor them, but he believed he knew them, and he believed now that he
detected one of them in Miss Shirley's note. Of course, one could take
another view of it. One could say to one's self that she was really so
fervently grateful that she could not trust some accident to bring them
together in a place where she was merely a part of the catering, as she
said, and he was a guest, and that she was excusable, or at least
mercifully explicable, in her wish to have him know that she appreciated
his goodness. Verrian had been very good, he knew that; he had saved the
day for the poor thing when it was in danger of the dreariest kind of
slump. She was a poor thing, as any woman was who had to make her own
way, and she had been sick and was charming. Besides, she had found out
his name and had probably recognized a quality of celebrity in it,