“I am glad that I did not ask him to call,” she thought as she took up her pencil.  “He does not interest me and very likely I shall never see him again.  He was pleasant certainly, but one can’t make acquaintances of every stranger one happens to meet.”  Then it seemed to her that she had been distant, almost rude, when he had bidden her good-night, and as she remembered the engaging frankness of his smile, the eager yet humble look with which he had waited at her door for the invitation she did not give, she regretted in spite of herself that she had been so openly inhospitable.  After all there was no reason that one should turn a man from one’s door simply because his personality didn’t please one’s fancy.  For a moment she dragged her mind for some word, some look in which she might have found a shadow of excuse for the dislike she felt.  “No, he said nothing foolish,” she confessed at last, “he was only kind and friendly and it is I who have offended—­I who have allowed myself to feel an unreasonable aversion.”  All at once an irritation against herself pervaded her thoughts, and she determined that if she met him again she would be more cordial—­that she would force herself to show a particular friendliness.  The recollection of his love for Madame Alta came to her, and she felt at the same time a sharp curiosity and a deep disgust—­“A man like that must love with madness,” she thought, and next, “but how do I know if it were love between them and why should I judge?” Her clasped hands went to her eyes and she prayed silently:  “Keep me apart, O Lord, keep me pure and apart!”

For a while she sat with bowed bead, then, as her hands fell into her lap, she broke into a little tender laugh at herself.  “What a fool I am, after all,” she lamented; “here I have seen a man whom I do not like—­once, for an hour—­and he has so troubled my quiet that I cannot put my mind upon my work.  What does it matter, and why should a stranger who displeases me have power to compel my thoughts?  It was but a trifle—­the distraction of an hour, nothing more—­and, whether I like him or not, by to-morrow I shall have forgotten his existence.”

But she remembered his face as he sat across from her in the dimly lighted stage, and she felt again, with a start, that he was the first man she had ever known.  “Yet he does not attract me, and I shall never see him again,” she thought after a moment.  She took up a little religious book from her desk and tried in vain to fix her wandering attention.  Life appeared all at once very full and very beautiful, and as she thought of the thronging city around her it seemed to her that she herself and the people in the street and the revolving stars were held securely in the hand of God.  The belief awoke in her that she was shielded and set apart for a predestined good, an exalted purpose, and she wondered if the purpose were already moving toward her out of the city and if its end would be only the fulfilling