"If you don't want to give me money, or a job, or something to eat," he announces loudly to the subway car, "then why not adopt me? I'm cleaner than a dog, I'm housebroken, so I don't have to be walked." Most of us are amused, but still, not many come across with the handout he's really after. I don't, I just don't feel like it today, and besides I'm absorbed in a book, which seems excuse enough.

I look up, though, after he passes, and notice that a rather pretty girl down the aisle is smiling, and that when the beggar -- he's surprisingly young, and surprisingly clean-cut, even good-looking -- comes to her seat, he smiles back, and when she gets off at the next station he pops out too and strides beside her, chatting her up, she still smiling, obviously feeling not unfriendly towards him, or, more than that, leaving the rest of us, or me anyway, to wonder if the whole thing was a put-on, two kids on a lark, but no, he did look like he needed help, hair too oily, clothes stained past the cusp of respectability, neither of which seemed to bother the girl at all, so who knows, maybe we've had the chance to be present at the onset of an unlikely romance, something from a movie, a "cute meet" they call it, and can go back to what we'd been doing, our consciences, such as they are, absolved for once, at peace.