ake, let her
gratitude wait. But when did a woman ever mean business, except in the
one great business?

XIV.

To have got that sillily superfluous note to Verrian without any one's
knowing besides, Miss Shirley must have stolen to his door herself and
slipped it under. In order to do this unsuspected and unseen, she must
have found out in some sort that would not give her away which his room
was, and then watched her chance. It all argued a pervasiveness in her,
after such a brief sojourn in the house, and a mastery of finesse that
he did not like, though, he reflected, he was not authorized to like or
dislike anything about her. He was thirty-seven years old, and he had
not lived through that time, with his mother at his elbow to suggest
inferences from facts, without being versed in wiles which, even when
they were honest, were always wiles, and in lures which, when they were
of the most gossamer tenuity, were yet of texture close enough to make
the man who blundered through them aware that they had been thrown
across his path. He understood, of course, that they were sometimes
helplessly thrown across it, and were mere expressions of abstract woman
with relation to abstract man, but that did not change their nature. He
did not abhor them, but he believed he knew them, and he believed now
that he detected one of them in Miss Shirley's note. Of course, one
could take another view of it. One could say to one's self that she was
really so fervently grateful that she could not trust some accident
to bring them together in a place where she was merely a part of the
catering, as she said, and he was a guest, and that she was excusable,
or at least mercifully explicable, in her wish to have him know that she
appreciated his goodness. Verrian had been very good, he knew that;
he had saved the day for the poor thing when it was in danger of the
dreariest kind of slump. She was a poor thing, as any woman was who had
to make her own way, and she had been sick and was charming. Besides,
she had found out his name and had probably recognized a quality of
celebrity in it, unknown to the other young people with whom he found
himself so strangely assorted under Mrs. Westangle's roof.

In the end, and upon the whole, Verrian would rather have liked, if the
thing could have been made to happen, meeting Miss Shirley long enough
to disclaim meriting her thanks, and to ascribe to the intrinsic value
of her scheme the brilliant s