"Oh, well, I'd hate to be disturbing him," he said politely.
"Better stay here and wait," Olive advised him. "It can't be long before he comes, and some of those glass pans were very awful."
"Do you think so? One never really minds a laboratory smell, after the first whiff of it. It seems to go into the system once for all, at the start. After," this time, the regret was even more palpable; "one always rather longs to get back into it."
Olive smiled.
"So I have noticed, with my father." Then her accent changed, grew less conventional. "You have had it, then, Mr. Brenton?"
"Of another sort. I had three years in a chemical laboratory, when I was in college," he told her simply.
"Really? And you liked it?"
His voice dropped by a whole octave, thrilled with a new resonance which, for some reason that she could not analyze then or after, set the girl's nerves all a-quiver. It was the voice of a man who, for the first time, is confessing aloud his master passion.
"It made life over for me," he said gravely.
"Then—Forgive me, if I have no right to ask the question. But one generally keeps on with a thing like that." Olive was painfully aware that her curiosity, however she wrapped it up in apologies, was most unjustifiable.