Later, that evening--it was while he rolled along in a hansom on
his way to dine out--he added that he hadn't taken in that she was
so interesting. The next morning in the midst of his work he quite
suddenly and irrelevantly reflected that his impression of her,
beginning so far back, was like a winding river that had at last
reached the sea.

His work in fact was blurred a little all that day by the sense of
what had now passed between them. It wasn't much, but it had just
made the difference. They had listened together to Beethoven and
Schumann; they had talked in the pauses, and at the end, when at
the door, to which they moved together, he had asked her if he
could help her in the matter of getting away. She had thanked him
and put up her umbrella, slipping into the crowd without an
allusion to their meeting yet again and leaving him to remember at
leisure that not a word had been exchanged about the usual scene of
that coincidence. This omission struck him now as natural and then
again as perverse. She mightn't in the least have allowed his
warrant for speaking to her, and yet if she hadn't he would have
judged her an underbred woman. It was odd that when nothing had
really ever brought them together he should have been able
successfully to assume they were in a manner old friends--that this
negative quantity was somehow more than they could express. His
success, it was true, had been qualified by her quick escape, so
that there grew up in him an absurd desire to put it to some better
test. Save in so far as some other poor chance might help him,
such a test could be only to meet her afresh at church. Left to
himself he would have gone to church the very next afternoon, just
for the curiosity of seeing if he should find her there. But he
wasn't left to himself, a fact he discovered quite at the last,