“Wait, please,” he said to the cabman.  “Or, if you like, you can go to that corner saloon down there.  I’ll know where to find you.”  And he gave him half a dollar.

The cabman hesitated between two theories of this conduct—­whether it was the generosity it seemed or was a ruse to “side step” payment.  He—­or his thirst—­decided for the decency of human nature; he drove confidingly away.  Norman went up the tiny stoop and rang.  The sound of a piano, in the room on the ground floor where there was light, abruptly ceased.  The door opened and Miss Hallowell stood before him.  She was throughout a different person from the girl of the office.  She had changed to a tight-fitting pale-blue linen dress made all in one piece.  Norman could now have not an instant’s doubt about the genuineness, the bewitching actuality, of her beauty.  The wonder was how she could contrive to conceal so much of it for the purposes of business.  It was a peculiar kind of beauty—­not the radiant kind, but that which shines with a soft glow and gives him who sees it the delightful sense of being its original and sole discoverer.  An artistic eye—­or an eye that discriminates in and responds to feminine loveliness—­would have been captivated, as it searched in vain for flaw.

If Norman anticipated that she would be nervous before the task of receiving in her humbleness so distinguished a visitor, he must have been straightway disappointed.  Whether from a natural lack of that sense of social differences which is developed to the most pitiful snobbishness in New York or from her youth and inexperience, she received him as if he had been one of the neighbors dropping in after supper.  And it was Norman who was ill at ease.  Nothing is more disconcerting to a man accustomed to be received with due respect to his importance than to find himself put upon the common human level and compelled to “make good” all over again from the beginning.  He felt—­he knew—­that he was an humble candidate for her favor—­a candidate with the chances perhaps against him.

The tiny parlor had little in it beside the upright piano because there was no space.  But the paper, the carpet and curtains, the few pieces of furniture, showed no evidence of bad taste, of painful failure at the effort to “make a front.”  He was in the home of poor people, but they were obviously people who made a highly satisfactory best of their poverty.  And in the midst of it all the girl shone like the one evening star in the mystic opalescence of twilight.

“We weren’t sure you were coming,” said she.  “I’ll call father. . . .  No, I’ll take you back to his workshop.  He’s easier to get acquainted with there.”

“Won’t you play something for me first?  Or—­perhaps you sing?”

“A very little,” she admitted.  “Not worth hearing.”

“I’m sure I’d like it.  I want to get used to my surroundings before I tackle the—­the biology.”