My mother said this was the New Consecration. He is the stuff of the dévot, she said. In another age he would have been a great ascetic, or a saint.
I was thankful the temptations, in these directions, were slight for people of our time. I liked better to think of him in one of his boyish moods, helping us to re-stock our aquarium.
Hermione Helmstone's inclination to mock behind his back, to imitate little stiffnesses and what she called his "Scotticisms," even Lady Barbara's unblushing Schwärmerei, was less a trial to me than the talk about saints and ascetics.
The Helmstone girls fell into the bad habit of dropping in to share our tea and our visitor.
Hermione pretended that she came solely to keep Barbara in countenance.
But Hermione on these occasions did most of the talking.
She didn't care what she said. "How long," she demanded, "are you going to stay?"—a heart-thumping question which none of us had ventured to put.
"Three weeks."
"A beggarly little while," she said, exchanging looks with her confederate. Then her malicious sympathy at his having to spend so much of his life in sick rooms and hospitals, "looking at horrors."
He said, somewhat shortly, that he spent most of his life nowadays—thank God!—in a laboratory.