No discourse could have worn a more welcome sound in Katharine's ears.

For weeks she had heard nothing that made such pleasant music in her mind.

It wakened echoes in all those remote fastnesses of her being where loneliness had brooded so long undisturbed.
She wished he would go on for ever talking of plants, and showing her how science felt not quite blindly for the law that ruled their endless variations.

A law that might be inscrutable but was certainly omnipotent appealed to her at the moment, because she could find nothing like it in possession of human lives.

Circumstances had long forced her, as they force most women in the flower of youth, to consider, painfully and minutely, all that part of life which is conspicuously without order; she had had to consider moods and wishes, degrees of liking or disliking, and their effect upon the destiny of people dear to her; she had been forced to deny herself any contemplation of that other part of life where thought constructs a destiny which is independent of human beings.