Page:Encounters (Bowen).djvu/182

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THE EVIL THAT MEN DO—


they had said good-bye. Fancy, all that from going to a poetry-reading instead of a picture-house. Fancy! And she hadn't even understood the poetry.

She opened her eyes and the practical difficulties of correspondence presented themselves. One could not write that sort of letter on Azure Bond; the notepaper he had used had been so indefinably right, somehow. She did not know how to address him. He had not begun with a "Dear" anything, but that did seem rather abrupt. One could not call him "Dear Mr. Simmonds" after an hour and ten minutes of such bus-riding; how could you call a person Mr. Simmonds when he said you were a nymph? Yet she couldn't take to "Charles." Everything practical, she found, had been crowded into the postscript of his letter—people said that women did that. He said he thought it would be better if she were to write to him at his office in Southampton Row; it was an insurance office, which somehow gave her confidence. "Dear Charles," she began.

It was a stiff little letter.

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