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.