It was all very devastatingly brilliant, but perhaps it was a little too reminiscent of an undergraduate debate. It was Severn himself, rather than what he said, that impressed. He had succeeded; he had made himself rich; those were the realest arguments. He had, in fact, done just what he liked with the world, and it had rewarded him far more generously than it did those who tamely let it do just what it liked with them. Yet, for all that, I found his arguments stimulating rather than convincing. Perhaps if he had been aiming them principally at me, they would have been different and more effective. But they weren't aimed at me. Terry was the target; and with him they certainly succeeded. Terry hadn't been an undergraduate at one of the older universities, and hadn't ever sat up till dawn shattering morality to bits and remoulding it nearer to the heart's desire. Severn's ideas were different not only in degree but in kind from any he had heard before, and the result was naturally severe.

All this leads up to what Helen did. (Yes, I must call her Helen.) Severn, just before we left, had called me into his study for a farewell whisky. He was in high good humour. "You fellows think I've been joking all the time," he said, "but I haven't.... Only some of the time." He laughed. "For instance, when I talked about Terry going abroad to Paris or Vienna or somewhere, I really meant it. I think it would be a splendid chance for him.... You might ask him, as you go home, how he'd care to have a few years working with Karelsky. He'll know who Karelsky is."

While we were drinking and chatting he had to answer the telephone. The matter, I gathered, was of a rather private nature, so I edged away towards the doorway that looked into the hall.

And then I saw Terry. His back was towards me, and in front of him, almost hidden from my sight by his tall and upright body, was Helen. The lights in the hall were very subdued, and all I could see of her distinctly was the knuckle of her right hand as she held the lapel of his coat.

She had been talking to him earnestly, and I caught what was evidently a final remark. "... and you mustn't take any notice of him, Terry—you mustn't.... I'd hate you to be influenced by him at all...." Only that, whispered very eagerly.

He said nothing in reply, and then suddenly, glancing over his shoulder with a little side-movement of her head, she saw me. I know she did, although at that moment I had almost withdrawn myself into the study. It was not deliberate eavesdropping, anyhow.

IV

Looking back on it all now, I can see exactly what was happening. But I couldn't then. It puzzled me that Terry had been so concerned by what had seemed to me merely a brilliant improvisation by a born improviser. But when I told him what Severn had said about Karelsky his manner changed. He seemed rather dazed with the idea, and he insisted on taking me back to his rooms that night and showing me everything he could find that had anything to do with Karelsky. Apparently he was a scientific star of the first magnitude. There was a photograph of him in a recent number of Discovery, and an article by him in the Science Review on the Function of the Nucleolus in the Life of the Animal Cell. His translated work "Eosinophilic Leucocytes in the Thymus of Postnatal Pigs" was, so Terry informed me, a monument of research; and he had also created a stir in the world of mathematics by a paper in a German journal on "Die Veranderlichkeit der Licht—und Farbe-Empfidnungen." Altogether he was undoubtedly a great man.

We sat up till nearly two in the morning discussing Karelsky and Vienna and so on. Terry's attitude astonished me, yet, in a way, it thrilled me also; it had, if the metaphor isn't too fanciful, the austere beauty of a Greek statue. What I mean is that he was thinking of nothing—nothing at all—except his work. The idea of having anything to do with the great Karelsky had stirred in him something that had always existed but had rarely permitted itself to be seen—a sort of frozen, white-hot passion for laboratory-research. It glowed in his eyes and trembled in his voice; it burned as fiercely as the art of any artist. It would be fine, he thought, to know Karelsky, and not only to know him, but to work with him and learn from him. It would be glorious to sit at the feet of the man who had discovered no fewer than three new species of spalax monticola.

V