Yet Mr. Woolley was once brought into contact with the things which cannot be defined and assessed; once he stood face to face with some strange visible resultant of those secret forces that lie beyond the human ken.  And, moreover, the adventure affected the whole of his domestic life.  The wonder and the pathos of the story lie in the fact that Nature, prodigal though she is known to be, should have wasted the rare and beautiful visitation on just Mr. Woolley.  Mr. Woolley was bathed in romance of the most singular kind, and the precious fluid ran off him like water off a duck’s back.

II

Ten years ago on a Thursday afternoon in July, Lionel Woolley, as he walked up through the new park at Bursley to his celibate rooms in Park Terrace, was making addition sums out of various items connected with the institution of marriage.  Bursley is next door to Hanbridge, and Lionel happened then to be cashier of the Bursley branch of the bank.  He had in mind two possible wives, each of whom possessed advantages which appealed to him, and he was unable to decide between them by any mathematical process.  Suddenly, from a glazed shelter near the empty bandstand, there emerged in front of him one of the delectable creatures who had excited his fancy.  May Lawton was twenty-eight, an orphan, and a schoolmistress.  She, too, had celibate rooms in Park Terrace, and it was owing to this coincidence that Lionel had made her acquaintance six months previously.  She was not pretty, but she was tall, straight, well dressed, well educated, and not lacking in experience; and she had a little money of her own.

‘Well, Mr. Woolley,’ she said easily, stopping for him as she raised her sunshade, ‘how satisfied you look!’

‘It’s the sight of you,’ he replied, without a moment’s hesitation.

He had a fine assured way with women (he need not have envied a curate accustomed to sewing meetings), and May Lawton belonged to the type of girl whose demeanour always challenges the masculine in a man.  Gazing at her, Lionel was swiftly conscious of several things:  the piquancy of her snub nose, the brightness of her smile, at once defiant and wistful, the lingering softness of her gloved hand, and the extraordinary charm of her sunshade, which matched her dress and formed a sort of canopy and frame for that intelligent, tantalizing face.  He remembered that of late he and she had grown very intimate; and it came upon him with a shock, as though he had just opened a telegram which said so, that May, and not the other girl, was his destined mate.  And he thought of her fortune, tiny but nevertheless useful, and how clever she was, and how inexplicably different from the rest of her sex, and how she would adorn his house, and set him off, and help him in his career.  He heard himself saying negligently to friends:  ’My wife speaks French like a native.  Of course, my wife has travelled a great deal.  My wife has thoroughly studied the management of children.  Now, my wife does understand the art of dress.  I put my wife’s bit of money into so-and-so.’  In short, Lionel was as near being in love as his character permitted.