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