She saw a smile lurking under his heavy lashes, and half ambushed in the corners of his mouth; and, vaguely conscious that she was rendering herself ridiculous, she bit her lip with ill-disguised vexation.
“Salome, I am afraid that under the garb of a jest you are making me acquainted with a very mournful truth. You have probably never heard of Lessing,—Gotthold Ephraim Lessing.”
“Oh, I am not quite as ignorant as a Pitcairn’s Islander; and I think I have somewhere seen that such a person as Lessing lived at Wolfenbüttel. He once said, ‘The chase is always worth more than the quarry.’ And again, ‘Did the Almighty, holding in his right hand Truth, and in his left Search after Truth, deign to proffer me the one I might prefer,—in all humility, but without hesitation, I should request Search after Truth.’ When you have nothing more important to occupy your attention, give ten minutes’ reflection to his admonition, and perhaps it may declare a dividend years hence. Last week I found your algebra on the rug before the library grate, and noticed several sums worked out in pencil on the margin. Are you fond of mathematics?”
“Not that I am aware of.”
“What progress have you made?”
“My knowledge of arithmetic is barely sufficient to take me through a brief shopping expedition.”
“Have you no ambition to increase it?”
“Dr. Grey, I have no ambition. That ‘last infirmity of noble minds’ has never attacked me; and, folding my hands, I chant ceaselessly to my soul, ‘Take thine ease, eat, drink, and be merry.’ The rapture of the mathematician, who bows before the shrine of his favorite science, is to my dull intellect as incomprehensible as the jargon of metaphysics or the mysteries wrapped up in Pali cerements. Equations, conic sections, differential calculus, constitute a skull and cross-bones to which I allow as wide a berth as possible.”
The weary dissatisfied expression of her large, luminous eyes, belied the sneer in her voice and the curl of her thin lip, and it cost her an effort to answer his next question.