“You ought to go on the stage,” said he.  “How Josephine—­Miss Burroughs would appreciate it!  For she’s got a keen sense of humor.”

“Not for the real jokes—­like herself,” replied Miss Hallowell.

“You’re prejudiced.”

“No.  I see her as she is.  Probably everyone else—­those around her—­see her money and her clothes and all that.  But I saw—­just her.”

He nodded thoughtfully.  Then he looked penetratingly at her.  “How did you happen to learn to do that?” he asked.  “To see people as they are?”

“Father taught me.”  Her eyes lighted up, her whole expression changed.  She became beautiful with the beauty of an intense and adoring love.  “Father is a wonderful man—­one of the most wonderful that ever lived.  He——­”

There was a knock at the door.  She startled, he looked confused.  Both awakened to a sense of their forgotten surroundings, of who and what they were.  She went and Mr. Sanders entered.  But even in his confusion Norman marveled at the vanishing of the fascinating personality who had been captivating him into forgetting everything else, at the reappearance of the blank, the pale and insignificant personality attached to a typewriting machine at ten dollars a week.  No, not insignificant, not blank—­never again that, for him.  He saw now the full reality—­and also why he, everyone, was so misled.  She made him think of the surface of the sea when the sky is gray and the air calm.  It lies smooth and flat and expressionless—­inert, monotonous.  But let sunbeam strike or breeze ever so faint start up, and what a commotion of unending variety!  He could never look at her again without being reminded of those infinite latent possibilities, without wondering what new and perhaps more charming, more surprising varieties of look and tone and manner could be evoked.

And while Sanders was talking—­prosing on and on about things Norman either already knew or did not wish to know—­he was thinking of her.  “If she happens to meet a man with enough discernment to fall in love with her,” he said to himself, “he certainly will never weary.  What a pity that such a girl shouldn’t have had a chance, should be wasted on some unappreciative chucklehead of her class!  What a pity she hasn’t ambition—­or the quality, whatever it is—­that makes those who have it get on, whether they wish or no.”

During the rest of the day he revolved from time to time indistinct ideas of somehow giving this girl a chance.  He wished Josephine would and could help, or perhaps his sister Ursula.  It was not a matter that could be settled, or even taken up, in haste.  No man of his mentality and experience fails to learn how perilous it is in the least to interfere in the destiny of anyone.  And his notion involved not slight interference with advice or suggestion or momentarily extended helping hand, but radical change of the whole current of destiny.  Also, he appreciated how difficult it is for a man to do anything for a young woman—­anything that would not harm more than it would help.  Only one thing seemed clear to him—­the “clever child” ought to have a chance.