"How do you know I don't want to marry?"
"You've told me so yourself, plenty of times. You said only a few weeks ago that you thought all men most uninteresting."
"Yes, I know. But I'm not so egotistical as not to suspect that the fault is mine. I don't know any men well, except you, and I don't think that you are at all uninteresting. If only I could be certain—"
Eva broke off suddenly, but Percy asked her what she wished to be certain about.
"If I could be certain that I was right—right for me, that is—certain that for me life and men and women were quite uninteresting, I don't think I should mind so much. I would cease thinking about it altogether. I might even teach in the Sunday school. If all things are uninteresting, I may as well do that, and cease to expect interest in anything."
"But aren't you conscious of any change in yourself?" asked Percy; "and doesn't the very fact that you are getting more and more conscious that everything is very dull go to prove it?"
"I don't quite understand."
Percy looked vaguely about, mentally speaking, for a parallel, and his eyes, sympathetically following his mind, lighted on an autumn-flowering bulb, which was just beginning to push its juicy, green spike above the ground.
"There," he said, "are you not, perhaps, like what that bulb was three days ago? If it were conscious it would have felt, not that it was growing, but that the earth round it was pressing it more closely. Perhaps you are on the point of sprouting. It couldn't have known it was sprouting."