man accretions, he seemed to know
the inward "sinking" that had been determined in a hungry man by some
extravagant sight of the preparation of somebody else's dinner. Florence
Ash was dining, so to speak, off the feast of appreciation, appreciation
of what she had to "tell" him, that he had left her seated at; and
she was welcome, assuredly--welcome, welcome, welcome, he musingly, he
wistfully, and yet at the same time a trifle mechanically, repeated,
stayed as he was a moment longer by the suffering shriek of another
public vehicle and a sudden odd automatic return of his mind to the
pretty girl, the flower of Mrs. Folliott's crowd, who had spoken to
him of Newton Winch. It was extraordinarily as if, on the instant, she
reminded him, from across the town, that she had offered him dinner: it
was really quite strangely, while he stood there, as if she had told
him where he could go and get it. With which, none the less, it was
apparently where he wouldn't find her--and what was there, after all, of
nutritive in the image of Newton Winch? He made up his mind in a moment
that it owed that property, which the pretty girl had somehow made
imputable, to the fact of its simply being just then the one image of
anything known to him that the terrible place had to offer. Nothing,
he a minute later reflected, could have been so "rum" as that, sick and
sore, of a bleak New York eventide, he should have had nowhere to turn
if not to the said Fiftieth Street.

That was the direction he accordingly took, for when he found the number
given him by the same remarkable agent of fate also present to his
memory he recognised the direct intervention of Providence and how it
absolutely required a miracle to explain his so precipitately embracing
this loosest of connections. The miracle indeed soon grew clearer:
Providence had, on some obscure system, chosen this very ridiculous hour
to save him from cultivation of the sin of selfishness, the obsession
of egotism, and was breaking him to its will by constantly directing his
attention to the claims of others. Who could say what at that critical
moment mightn't have become of Mrs. Folliott (otherwise too then so
sadly embroiled!) if she hadn't been enabled to air to him her grievance
and her rage?--just as who could deny that it must have done Florence
Ash a world of good to have put her thoughts about Bob in order by the
aid of a person to whom the vision of Bob in the light of those thoughts