He found imbecility in
the manners of Spinks, coarseness and violence in the figures of Mrs.
Downey and Miss Bishop, insipidity in the whole person of Miss Flossie
Walker. And now, as he looked round the table, he wondered how it was
he ever came there. After living for four weeks with Lucia Harden or
the thought of her, he had a positive difficulty in recognizing even
Spinks and Flossie as people he had once intimately known. Miss Roots
alone, for some inscrutable reason, seemed familiar, in keeping with
that divine experience to which the actual hour did violence. It was
almost as if she understood.

A shrewdly sympathetic glance went out from a pair of hazel eyes set
in a plain, clever, strenuous face. Miss Roots was glad, she said, to
see him back again. He turned to her with the question that had never
failed to flatter and delight. Was Miss Roots doing anything specially
interesting now? But there was no interest in his tone.

Miss Roots looked up with a smile that would have been gay if it had
not been so weary. Yes, she was collecting material for a book on
Antimachus of Colophon. No, not her own book.

(At the mention of Antimachus of Colophon, Mr. Soper folded his arms
and frowned with implacable resentment. Mr. Soper was convinced that
these subjects were introduced on purpose to exclude him from the
conversation.)

Miss Roots, like Mr. Rickman, lived apart from the murmur of the
boarding-house. She had raised a barrier of books in a bedroom six
feet by nine, behind which she worked obscurely. She had never been
known to converse until Mr. Rickman came. A sort of fluctuating
friendship had sprung up between Mr. Rickman and Miss Roots. He had an
odd feeling, half pity, half liking, for this humble servant of
literature, doomed to its labour, ignorant of its delight. And yet
Miss Roots had a heart which went out to the mad-cap journalist, wild
with youth and the joy of letters. And now these things were coming
back to her. The sources of intellectual desire had been drying up
with the blood in her cheeks; but when Rickman came they began to flow
again. When Rickman talked as only he could talk, Miss Roots felt a
faint fervour, a reminiscent thrill. She preened her poor little
thoughts as if for pairing time, when soul fluttered to soul across
the dinner-table. She knew that, intellectually speaking, she had been
assigned to Rickman; for Mrs. Downey held that just as Mr. Rickman was
the first to rouse Miss