They don't like my theories." When he talked of his work he seemed all at once another man to her, and she discerned presently, while she listened to his earnest voice, that he was one of the men whose emotional natures are nourished by an abstract and impersonal passion--by the passion for science, for truth in its concrete form.
After all, he was a mystic only in his eyes.

Beneath his dreamer's face he was a scientist to the last drop of his blood, to the last fibre of his being.

"He can't be hurt deeply through the heart," she thought; "only through the mind." "I've wondered about you all summer," he repeated presently, "and yet I kept away--partly, I suppose, because I was thinking too much of you." At his change of tone from the impersonal to the tender all the frozen self-pity in her heart seemed to melt suddenly, threatening in its overflow the very foundations of her philosophy.

The temptation to yield utterly, to rest for a while not on her strength, but on his, assailed her with the swiftness and the violence of a spiritual revulsion.

For an instant she surrendered to the uncontrollable force of this desire; then she drew quickly back while the world about her--the room, the window, the bare skeleton of the elevated road, the street, and even the rose geranium blooming on the sill--became as remote and impalpable as a phantom.
"It has been a long summer," she heard herself saying from a distance in a thin and colourless voice.
"And you suffered ?" "Sometimes, but I'm interested in my work, and I've been thinking and planning all summer." For a moment he was silent, and though she did not look at him, she could feel his intense gaze on her face.