"One must make hay while the sun shines," she added.

"I must lay up a store of learning against dark days.

Somehow, my imagination refuses to compass the idea that I may be in Rome indefinitely." He knew he had divined her real motives; but he felt that if he might have said to her--what it seemed impossible to say--that fortune possibly had in store for her a bitter disappointment, she would have been capable of answering, immediately after the first sense of pain, "Say then that I am laying up resources for solitude!" But all the accusations were not his.

He had been watching, once, during some brief argument, to see whether she would take her forefinger out of her Murray, into which she had inserted it to keep a certain page.
It would have been hard to say why this point interested him, for he had not the slightest real apprehension that she was dry or pedantic.

The simple human truth was, the poor fellow was jealous of science.
In preaching science to her, he had over-estimated his powers of self-effacement.