stiff hair was shorn in rather odd and rather ugly lines along his
forehead and temples, and of his clothes the kindest thing to say was
that they were unobtrusive. Franklin had once said of himself, with
comic dispassionateness, that he looked like a cheap cigar, and the
comparison was apt. He seemed to have been dried, pressed, and moulded,
neatly and expeditiously, by some mechanical process that turned out
thousands more just like him. A great many things, during this process,
had been done to him, but they were commonplace, though complicated
things, and they left him, while curiously finished, curiously
undifferentiated. The hurrying streets of any large town in his native
land would, one felt, be full of others like him: good-tempered, shrewd,
alert, yet with an air of placidity, too, as though it were a world that
required effort and vigilance of one, and yet, these conditions
fulfilled, would always justify one's expectations. If differences there
were in Franklin Kane, they were to be sought for, they did not present
themselves; and he himself would have been the last to be conscious of
them. He didn't think of himself as differentiated; he didn't desire
differentiation.

He advanced now towards his beloved, after a slight hesitation, for the
sunlight in which she stood as well as her own radiant appearance seemed
to have dazzled him a little. Althea held out her hands, and the tears
came into her eyes; it was as if she hadn't known, until then, how
lonely she was. 'O Franklin, I'm so glad to see you,' she said.

He held her hands, gazing at her with a gentle yet intent rapture, and
he forgot, in a daring greater than any he had ever known, to kiss them.
Franklin never took anything for granted, and Althea knew that it was
because he saw her tears and saw her emotion that he could ask her now,
hesitatingly, yet with sudden confidence: 'Althea, it's been so
long--you are so lovely--it will mean nothing to you, I know; so may I
kiss you?'

Put like that, why shouldn't he? Conscience had not a qualm, and
Franklin had never seemed so dear to her. She smiled a sisterly benison
upon his request, and, still holding her hands, he leaned to her and
kissed her. Closing her eyes she wondered intently for a moment, able,
in the midst of her motion, to analyse it; for, yes, it had thrilled
her. She needed to be kissed, were it only Franklin who kissed her.

They went, hand in hand, to a sofa, and there she was able to