It was Nayan who first drew attention to this remarkable characteristic. She spoke about him often now with Dr. Fillery, for as the weeks passed and she realized the uselessness, the impossibility, of the plan she had proposed to herself, she found relief in talking frankly about him to her older friend.
"Always, always after I leave him," she confessed, "a profound and searching melancholy gets hold of me, poignant as death, yet an extraordinary unrealized beauty behind it somewhere. It steals into my very blood and bones. I feel an intense dissatisfaction with the world, with people as they are, and a burning scorn for all that is small, unworthy, petty, mean—and yet a hopelessness of ever attaining to that something which he knows and lives so easily." She sighed, gazing into his eyes a moment. "Or of ever making others see it," she added.
"And that 'something,'" he asked, "can you define it?"
She shook her head. "It's in me, within reach even, but—the word he used is the only one—forgotten."
"Perhaps—has it ever occurred to you?—that he simply cannot describe it. There are no words, no means at his disposal—no human terms?"
"Perhaps," she murmured.
"Desirable, though?" he urged her gently.
She clasped her hands, smiling. "Heavenly," she murmured, closing her eyes a moment as though to try and recall it. "Yet when I'm with him," she went on, "he never quite realizes for me the state of wonder and delight his presence promises. His personality suggests rather than fulfils." She paused, a wistful, pained expression in her dark eyes. "The failure," she added quickly, lest she seem to belittle him of whom she spoke, "of course lies in myself. I refuse, you see—I can't say why, though I feel it's wise—to let myself be dominated by that strange, lost part of me he stimulates."
"True," interposed Dr. Fillery. "I understand. Yet to have felt this even is a sign——"
"That he stirs the deepest, highest in me? This hint of divine beauty in the unrealized under-self?"