2. Effusiveness.
3. Humility.
4. Vulgarity—under which heading she included everything her step-mother did, or said, or thought, or wore, or was. Yet she did not quite dislike her step-mother.
This exhaustive survey left her with the impression of a hypercritical, overconfident, extremely unpleasant young ego, which intended to get as much out of life as possible with as little given in return, and which so far had got about what it deserved. She was glad that no one of her acquaintance was clever enough to see her quite as clearly as she saw herself.
Except, of course, Mr. Nikolai: and he did not count.
There was something odd about Stefan Nikolai's attitude toward his fellow-men. He seemed to regard humanity as if it were a vast picture puzzle which it was his privilege to take apart and put together again for his amusement. He asked nothing of any piece of the puzzle except that it fit eventually into the spot where it belonged. Joan had a comfortable feeling that he would presently find her spot for her in case she failed to find it for herself. But she preferred to find it for herself, if possible.
His letter in response to the one in which she informed him of her impending engagement to Eduard Desmond had confirmed her faith in his uncanny insight. She did not realize how vividly her untrammeled descriptions made people and conditions about her known to a student of human kind. If she always saw things more clearly herself after she had set them down in black and white, the clarity doubtless extended to other vision.
He wrote from Russia, where he had been living for a while among the mouzhiks in order to understand how mouzhiks live. His curiosity about such things was insatiable.
"I also have a wish to see how Tzars live, since it is an order that is passing," he added casually. "But I fear for one of my race that will be difficult. Mouzhiks have less reason to fear us Jews than have Tsars."
Then he went off at one of his usual tangents, and described to Joan briefly the theory of vaccination. "It is a question of phagocytes, you understand. Metchnikoff's idea is that when a disease manifests itself a certain number of phagocytes detach themselves from the blood to fight it. The stronger the virus injected of that disease, the greater the number of phagocytes formed; and it is the presence of these detached phagocytes after the virus has run its course that render the patient immune from further attack."