The Nine-Tenths

"[...]seemed wild and impossible romance. It smote his heart-strings and set them trembling with music. He wondered why he had been so stupid all these years and evaded life, evaded joys that should have been his twenty years earlier. Now it seemed to him that his youth had passed from him defeated of its splendor. If Myra came to-day he would tell her. The very thought gave his heart a lovely quake of fear, a trembling that communicated itself to his hands and down his legs, a throbbing joy dashed with a strange tremor. And then as he wanted, as he wished for, the door beside him opened and the bell sharply sounded. She stood there, very small, very slight, but quite charming in her neat, lace-touched clothes. A fringe at the wrist, a bunch at the neck, struck her off as some one delicate and sensitive, and the face strengthened this impression. It was long and oval, with a narrow woman-forehead [...]".