"Ah, still thinking about the face? You mean I'm lucid when you smile, and daffy when you don't. But that's a case of it—your face——"
"My face a case of what? You're getting commercial —even shoppy. Really, if this continues, Mr. Linford, I shall be obliged——"
"A case of it—of this blankness of mine. Instead of continuing my early prejudice, which I now recall was preposterously in your favour, I survey you coldly for the first time. You know I'm afraid to look at print for fear I've forgotten how to read."
"Nonsense!"
"No—I tell you I feel exactly like one of those chaps from another planet, who are always reaching here in the H.G. Wells's stories—a gentleman of fine attainments in his own planet, mind you—bland, agreeable, scholarly—with marked distinction of bearing, and a personal beauty rare even on a planet where the flaunting of one's secretest bones is held to betoken the only beauty—you understand that?——Well, I come here, and everything is different—ideals of beauty, people absurdly holding for flesh on their bones, for example —numbers, language, institutions, everything. Of course, it puzzles me a little, but see the value I ought to be to the world, having a mature mind, yet one as clean of preconceptions and prejudice as a new-born babe's."
"Oh, so that is why you could see that I'm not——"
"Also, why I could see that you are—that's it, smile! Nance, you are a dear, when you smile—you make a man feel so strong and protecting. But if you knew all the queer things I've thought in the last week about time and people and the world. This morning I woke up mad because I'd been cheated out of the past. Where is all the past, Nance? There's just as much past somewhere as there is future—if one's soul has no end, it had no beginning. Why not worry about the past as we do about the future? First thing I'm going to do—start a Worry-About-the-Past Club, with dues and a president, and by-laws and things!"
"Don't you think I'd better send Clytie, now?"
"No; please wait a minute." He clutched her hand with a new strength, and raised on his elbow to face her, then, speaking lower:
"Nance, you know I've had a feeling it wasn't the right thing to ask the old gentleman this—he might think I hadn't been studying at college—but you tell me—what is this about the atoning blood of Jesus Christ? It was a phrase he used the other day, and it stuck in my mind."