Yet even its ample drapery could not dissemble the fact that
she was quite small, girlishly slight, like the woman in the
doorway; nor did aught temper her impersonal and detached
composure, which had also been an attribute of the woman in the
doorway. And, again, she was alone, unchaperoned, unprotected....
Yes? Or no? And, if yes: what to do? Was he to alight and accost
her, accuse her of forcing an entrance to his rooms for the sole
purpose (as far as ascertainable) of presenting him with the
outline of her hand in the dust of his desk's top?... Oh, hardly!
It was all very well to be daringly eccentric and careless of the
world's censure; but one scarcely cared to lay one's self open
either to an unknown girl's derision or to a sound pummeling at
the hands of fellow passengers enraged by the insult offered to an
unescorted woman....
The young man was still pondering ways and means when a dull bump
apprised him that the ferry-boat was entering the Long Island City
slip. "The devil!" he exclaimed in mingled disgust and dismay,
realizing that his distraction had been so thorough as to permit
the voyage to take place almost without his realizing it. So that
now--worse luck!--it was too late to take any one of the hundred
fantastic steps he had contemplated half seriously. In another two
minutes his charming mystery, so bewitchingly incarnated, would
have slipped out of his life, finally and beyond recall. And he
could do naught to hinder such a finale to the adventure.
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