The look of immobility passed from his face; his eyes grew warmer, and it seemed to her that he became more alive and more human. "Oh, I think a great deal. My ideas have changed too." He was talking rapidly and without connection. "I am not the same man that I was a few years ago. I may be wrong, but I feel that I've got down to a firmer basis—a basis of facts." Then he turned to her impulsively, "I wouldn't say this to any one else, Corinna, because no one else would understand what I mean—but I've learned a good deal from Gideon Vetch."
"Ah!" Her eyes were smiling. "I think I know what you mean."
"Of course you know. But imagine Father! He would think, if I told him, that it was a symptom of mental derangement—that some German shell had left a permanent dent in my brain."
"Perhaps. Yet I am not sure that you understand your father. I think he is more like you than you fancy; that if you once pierced his reserve, you would find him a sentimentalist at heart. There is your office," she added, "but you must not get out now. We will turn back for a quarter of an hour." She spoke to the chauffeur, and then said to Stephen, with a sensation of unutterable relief, "a quarter of an hour won't make any difference at the office to-day."
"Perhaps not when I've lost three hours already. I sometimes think they would never notice it if I stayed away all the time. But what I mean about Vetch is simply that he has set me thinking. He does that, you know. Oh, I admit that he is mistaken—or downright wrong—in a number of ways! He is too sensational for our taste—too flamboyant; but one can't get away from him. He has shaken the dust from us; he has jolted us into movement. I have a feeling somehow that his personality is spread all over the place—that we are smeared with Gideon Vetch, as the darkeys would say."
He was already a different Stephen from the one who had got into her car an hour ago, and she breathed a secret prayer of thanksgiving.
"I think even John feels that now and then," she said, and a moment afterward, "Is it possible, do you suppose, that we shall find when it is too late that this Gideon Vetch is the stone that the builders rejected? A ridiculous fancy, and yet who knows, it might turn out to be true. Stranger things have happened than that!"
"It may be. One never can tell." Then he laughed with tolerant affection. "I've found out the trouble with John."
"The trouble with John?" Her voice trembled.
"Yes, the trouble with John is that he lacks blood at the brain. He is trying to make a living organism out of a skeleton—to build the world over on a skull and cross-bones—and it can't be done. I admire John as much as I ever did. He is as logical as a problem in geometry. But Vetch is nearer to the truth of things. Vetch has the one attribute that John needs to make him complete."