She seated herself at the machine and set to work.  As his mind was full of the agreement he could not concentrate on anything else.  From time to time he glanced at her.  Then he gave up trying to work and sat furtively observing her.  What a quaint little mystery it was!  There was in it—­that is, in her—­not the least charm for him.  But, in all his experience with women, he could recall no woman with a comparable development of this curious quality of multiple personalities, showing and vanishing in swift succession.

There had been a time when woman had interested him as a puzzle to be worked out, a maze to be explored, a temple to be penetrated—­until one reached the place where the priests manipulated the machinery for the wonders and miracles to fool the devotees into awe.  Some men never get to this stage, never realize that their own passions, working upon the universal human love of the mysterious, are wholly responsible for the cult of woman the sphynx and the sibyl.  But Norman, beloved of women, had been let by them into their ultimate secret—­the simple humanness of woman; the clap-trappery of the oracles, miracles, and wonders.  He had discovered that her “divine intuitions” were mere shrewd guesses, where they had any meaning at all; that her eloquent silences were screens for ignorance or boredom—­and so on through the list of legends that prop the feminist cult.

But this girl—­this Miss Hallowell—­here was a tangible mystery—­a mystery of physics, of chemistry.  He sat watching her—­watching the changes as she bent to her work, or relaxed, or puzzled over the meaning of one of her own hesitating stenographic hieroglyphics—­watched her as the waning light of the afternoon varied its intensity upon her skin.  Why, her very hair partook of this magical quality and altered its tint, its degree of vitality even, in harmony with the other changes. . . .  What was the explanation?  By means of what rare mechanism did her nerve force ebb and flow from moment to moment, bringing about these fascinating surface changes in her body?  Could anything, even any skin, be better made than that superb skin of hers—­that master work of delicacy and strength, of smoothness and color?  How had it been possible for him to fail to notice it, when he was always looking for signs of a good skin down town—­and up town, too—­in these days of the ravages of pastry and candy? . . .  What long graceful fingers she had—­yet what small hands!  Certainly here was a peculiarity that persisted.  No—­absurd though it seemed, no!  One way he looked at those hands, they were broad and strong, another way narrow and gracefully weak.

He said to himself:  “The man who gets that girl will have Solomon’s wives rolled into one.  A harem at the price of a wife—­or a—­” He left the thought unfinished.  It seemed an insult to this helpless little creature, the more rather than the less cowardly for being unspoken; for, no doubt her ideas of propriety were firmly conventional.