nd went
nervously to this curl-paper.

"Oh, good-morning!" she said, breathlessly, as if she had been
running.

Horace returned her greeting gravely. "Can I see you a few moments,
Miss Lucy?" he said.

A wild light came into the girl's eyes. Her cheeks flushed again.
Again she spoke in her nervous, panting voice, and asked him in. She
led the way into the parlor and excused herself flutteringly. She was
back in a few moments. Instead of the curl-paper there was a little,
soft, dark, curly lock on her forehead. She had also fastened the
neck of her wrapper with a gold brooch. The wrapper sloped well from
her shoulders and displayed a lovely V of white neck. She sat down
opposite Horace, and the simple garment adjusted itself to her slim
figure, revealing its tender outlines.

Lucy looked at Horace, and her expression was tragic, foolish, and of
almost revolting wistfulness. She was youth and womanhood in its most
helpless and pathetic revelation. Poor Lucy could not help herself.
She was a thing always devoured and never consumed by a flame of
nature, because of the lack of food to satisfy an inborn hunger.

Horace felt all this perfectly in an analytical way. He sympathized
in an analytical way, but in other respects he felt that curious
resentment and outrage of which a man is capable and which is fiercer
than outraged maidenliness. For a man to be beloved when his own
heart does not respond is not pleasant. He cannot defend himself, nor
even recognize facts, without being lowered in his own self-esteem.
Horace had done, as far as he could judge, absolutely nothing
whatever to cause this state of mind in Lucy. He was self-exonerated
as to that, but the miserable reason for it all, in his mere
existence as a male of his species, filled him with shame for himself
and her, and also with anger.

He strove to hold to pity, but anger got the better of him. Anger and
shame coupled together make a balking team. Now the man was really at
a loss what to say. Lucy sat before him with her expression of
pitiable self-revelation, and waited, and Horace sat speechless. Now
he was there, he wondered what he had been such an ass as to come
for. He wondered what he had ever thought he could say, would say.
Then Rose's face shone out before his eyes, and his impulse of
protection made him firm. He spoke abruptly. "Miss Lucy--" he began.
Lucy cast her eyes down and waited, her whole attitude was that of
utter passiveness and yiel