Even now, when he sat within a yard of her, how easily her mind ranged hither and thither! Suddenly a picture presented itself before her, without any effort on her part as pictures will, of herself in these very rooms; she had come in from a lecture, and she held a pile of books in her hand, scientific books, and books about mathematics and astronomy which she had mastered.

She put them down on the table over there.

It was a picture plucked from her life two or three years hence, when she was married to William; but here she checked herself abruptly.
She could not entirely forget William's presence, because, in spite of his efforts to control himself, his nervousness was apparent.

On such occasions his eyes protruded more than ever, and his face had more than ever the appearance of being covered with a thin crackling skin, through which every flush of his volatile blood showed itself instantly.

By this time he had shaped so many sentences and rejected them, felt so many impulses and subdued them, that he was a uniform scarlet.
"You may say you don't read books," he remarked, "but, all the same, you know about them.