‘Of course!’ said Mistress Mary, reciting provokingly:
‘“My lyre I tune, my voice I raise,
But with my numbers mix my sighs,
And whilst I sing Euphelia’s praise
I fix my soul on Chloe’s eyes.”’
‘How delightful,’ she added, ‘how inspiring it is to see a young man so devoted to science, particularly to this neglected science! I shall be charmed to know more of his psychology and observe his observations.’
‘He is extremely clever.’
‘I have no doubt of it from what you tell me, both clever and ingenious.’
‘And his cottage is lovely; it will be finished and furnished by next summer,—Queen Anne, you know.’
Now, this was so purely irrelevant that there was a wicked hint of intention about it; and though Mistress Mary was smiling (and quaking) in the very depths of her heart, she cruelly led back the conversation into safe educational channels. ‘Isn’t it curious,’ she said, ‘that we should have thought Lisa, not the twins, the impossible problem? Yet, as I have written you, her solution is something to which we can look forward with reasonable confidence. It is scarcely eighteen months, but the work accomplished is almost incredible, even to me, and I have watched and counted every step.’
‘The only explanation must be this,’ said Rhoda, ‘that her condition was largely the fruit of neglect and utter lack of comprehension. The state of mind and body in which she came to us was out of all proportion to the moving cause, when we discovered it. Her mother thought she would be an imbecile, the Grubbs treated her as one, and nobody cared to find out what she really was or could be.’
‘Her brain had been writ upon by the “moving finger,”’ quoted Mary, ‘though the writing was not graved so deep but that love and science could erase it. You remember the four lines in Omar Khayyàm?
“‘The moving finger writes; and, having writ,
Moves on: nor all your piety nor wit
Shall lure it back to cancel half a line,
Nor all your tears wash out a word of it.”’