still she had no power.

And then she heard him go.

Even then she went on with her work; she finished her "take" and
laid down her pencil. It was finished now--and he had gone.
Finished?--_Gone?_ She was tearing open the envelope of the
letter.

This was what she read:

"Little dictionary sprite, sunshine vender, and girl to be loved, if
I were a free man I would say to you--Come, little one, and let us
learn of love. Let us learn of it, not as one learns from
dictionaries, but let us learn from the morning glow and the evening
shades. But Miss Noah, maker of dictionaries and creeper into
hearts, the bound must not call to the free. They might fittingly
have used my name as one of the synonyms under that word Failure,
but I trust not under Coward.

"And now, you funny little Miss Noah from the University of Chicago,
don't I know that your heart is blazing forth the assurance that you
don't _care_ for any of those things--the world, people, common
sense--that you want just love? They made a grand failure of you out
at your university; they taught you philosophy and they taught you
Greek, and they've left you just as much the woman as women were
five thousand years ago. Oh, I know all about you--you little girl
whose hair tried so hard to be red. Your soul touched mine as we sat
there writing words--words--words, the very words in which men try
to tell things, and can't--and I know all about what you would do.