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 Roots to conversation, so Miss Roots alone had the power of drawing him out to the best advantage.

“Indeed?” said Rickman in a voice devoid of all intelligence.

Now if anything could have drawn Mr. Rickman out it was Antimachus of Colophon.  Four weeks ago he would have been more interested in Antimachus than Miss Roots herself, he would have talked about him by the hour together.  So that when he said nothing but “Indeed?” she perceived that something was the matter with him.  But she also perceived that he was anxious to be talked to, therefore she talked on.

Miss Roots was right; though his mind was unable to take in a word she said to him, he listened, soothed by the singular refinement of her voice.  It was a quality he had not noticed in it four weeks ago.  Suddenly a word flashed out, dividing the evening with a line of light.

“So you’ve been staying in Harmouth?”

He started noticeably, and looked at her as if he had not heard.  Miss Roots seemed unaware of having said anything specially luminous; she repeated her question with a smile.

“Why?” he asked.  “Have you been there?”

“I’ve not only been there, I was born there.”

He looked at her.  Miss Roots had always been, to say the least of it, prosaic, and now it was as if poetry had dropped from her lips, as if she had said, “I too was born in Arcadia.”

“I suppose,” she said, “you saw that beautiful old house by the river?”