Something of this was apparent in Miss Fraenkel as she leaned out of the window and met our gaze with delighted eyes.
"Isn't he just won-der-ful?" she exclaimed.
"Oh sure! But listen. I've got a plan. Why can't you two make it into a book? It 'ud be perfectly lovely! You know, Mr. Legge, you're quite an artist, aren't you? And Mr. Pedderick here, he does some writing. Oh I'm sure you could do it! You know...." Miss Fraenkel made a pause luminous with bright glances, "a picture of those two, in the café having a dinner; a real kissing picture. I'm sure she would look so sweet!"
"Ah!" said Bill, "but what's the end of the story?"
"Why sure!" faltered Miss Fraenkel. "They get--get married! That's the end of every English story, isn't it?"
Bill cackled from the kitchen, artlessly and shrill. "----and lived happy ever after!" added Miss Fraenkel, with radiant unwinking hazel eyes.
She went away after tea, to her pew in the gaunt wooden Episcopal Church in Chestnut Street, rapt in a felicitous dream of romanticism. It was nothing to her that Mr. Carville had poured diluted vitriol upon some women who clamoured for the vote, nothing that he had barely deigned to notice her existence. Once aware that he essayed to be a spell-binder, she accepted him with utter _abandon_ in that rôle. She permitted him to bind the spell; and as she walked with short quick steps along Van Diemen's Avenue, her brown head held high and unswerving, I could not refrain from the fancy that she moved as one in a trance.
It was a disappointment to us that we heard the whistle of the five o'clock train before we realized that Mr. Carville was on board. The sound was the one thing needful to set our mind and tongues free to talk of him. So potent had been his atmosphere that, to be honest, we had been unable to apply judgment to his case. When we gathered at dinner the discussion was in full and amiable swing.
"It is very difficult," I said, "to distinguish the fact from the fiction, not because he is extraordinarily skilful in 'joining his flats,' but because he is so absorbed in the story himself that it would be quite inconceivable to him that anyone would _not_ be interested. He has evidently never imagined such a contingency. Such ingeniousness is more than uncommon. It is sublime."