"Oh, Dr. Fillery, I am glad to see you here. I thought you were always too busy for unscientific people like us. Yet, in a way, we're all seekers, are we not? I've been reading your Physiology book, and I did so want to ask you about something in it. I wonder if you'd mind."
He shook hands with a young-old woman, wearing bobbed hair and glasses, and speaking with an intense, respectful, yet self-apologetic manner.
"You've forgotten me, but I quite understand. You see so many people. I'm Miss Lance. I sent you my little magazine, 'Simplicity,' once, and you acknowledged it so sweetly, though, of course, I understood you had not the time to write for it." She continued for several minutes, smiling up at him, her hands clasping and unclasping themselves behind a back clothed with some glittering coloured material that rather fascinated him by its sheen. She kept raising herself on her toes and sinking back again in a series of jerky rhythms.
He gave her his delightful smile.
"Oh, Dr. Fillery!" she exclaimed, with pleasure, leading him to a divan, upon which he let himself down in such a position that he could observe the door from the street as well as the door where LeVallon had disappeared. "This is really too good-natured of you. Your book set me on fire simply"—her eyes wandering to the other door—"and what a wonderful looking person you've brought with you——"
"I fear it's not very easy reading," he interposed patiently.
"To me it was too delightful for words," she rattled on, pleased by the compliment implied. "I devour all your books and always review them myself in the magazine. I wouldn't trust them to anyone else. I simply can't tell you how physiology stimulates me. Humanity needs imaginative books, especially just now." She broke off with a deprecatory smile. "I do what I can," she added, as he made no remark, "to make them known, though in such a very small way, I fear." Her interest, however, was divided, the two powerful attractions making her quite incoherent. "Your friend," she ventured again, "he must be Eastern perhaps? Or is that merely sunburn? He looks most unusual."
"Sunburn merely, Miss Lance. You must have a chat with him later."
"Oh, thank you, thank you, Dr. Fillery. I do so love unusual people...."
He listened gravely. He was gentle, while she confided to him her little inner hopes and dreams about the "simple life." She introduced adjectives she believed would sound correct, if spoken very quickly, until, between the torrent of "psychical," "physiological" and once or twice, "psychological," she became positively incoherent in a final entanglement from which there was no issue but a convulsive gesture. None the less, she was bathed in bliss. She monopolized the great man for a whole ten minutes on a divan where everybody could see that they talked earnestly, intimately, perhaps even intellectually, together side by side.