Unconscious? I don't know. First of all, I felt
certain that this was no chance meeting. Something had happened before.
Was he a man for a _coup-de-foudre_, the lightning stroke of love? I
don't think so. That sort of susceptibility is luckily rare. A world of
inflammable lovers of the Romeo and Juliet type would very soon end in
barbarism and misery. But it is a fact that in every man (not in every
woman) there lives a lover; a lover who is called out in all his
potentialities often by the most insignificant little things--as long as
they come at the psychological moment: the glimpse of a face at an
unusual angle, an evanescent attitude, the curve of a cheek often looked
at before, perhaps, but then, at the moment, charged with astonishing
significance. These are great mysteries, of course. Magic signs.
I don't know in what the sign consisted in this case. It might have been
her pallor (it wasn't pasty nor yet papery) that white face with eyes
like blue gleams of fire and lips like red coals. In certain lights, in
certain poises of head it suggested tragic sorrow.
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