‘Besides,’ he added, ‘the book comes first with me always. Nothing else matters.’
She ruminated upon that thought for several seconds. The bluntness, the ungraciousness of it at once repelled and attracted her. She could not but admire Edward’s capacity for impersonal enthusiasm; it made him great; and she found something fascinating in his indifference to lesser things. Among those lesser things she was content, for the moment, to include herself. To be his tool, to help him in his work: such service, she felt, would be its own sufficient reward.
Noting her silence, ‘That seems to you inhuman?’ he asked.
‘It seems to me superhuman,’ answered Sheila. ‘Perhaps that’s the secret of fine living: to subordinate all personal things to some great impersonal passion.’
‘That’s just how I feel,’ he said.
Sheila continued. ‘Unless we’re content to be miserable and useless, we must have a consuming passion, if it’s only for collecting beetles: something that doesn’t depend on anybody else.... Persons change,’ she added sadly.
‘You’re thinking of Hypatia,’ he suggested.
‘Hypatia, yes. And someone else. It’s like building your house on sand, you know, ever to rely on persons.’
‘Still,’ said Edward, ‘if a person’s rational and consistent—and there are consistent persons.’
‘Yes, and there are clockwork toys. A perfectly consistent person must be very much like them, I should think.’