I had for several days been conscious of the presence of a new-comer in the house. He was a young Southerner, with fine dark eyes, and extraordinary alertness of body.
There was something in the stranger’s face that pleased me. Perhaps it was his resolute mouth and a certain air of high-mindedness. Perhaps it was only the boyish way in which his soft hair waved back from his forehead.
I called him “the Lad,” because he looked so young by the side of the Man of the World.
One day as I was talking with my friend, the Butterfly Hunter, I was startled by being told that the Lad had done some brilliant scientific work, and had already made for himself a reputation.
“He is only a boy!” I exclaimed.
“He is a man of twenty-seven,” said the Lad, who had come in unnoticed.
After that we became acquainted rapidly.
I had never seen anybody so keenly alive. He was eager, restless, quivering with vitality. There was a kind of ferocity in his way of working; he was busy finishing a book, with a name occupying two lines. I do not yet know what it means. And he walked every day for miles, coming home hungry and tired.
I found myself trying to classify him. I had fallen into the habit of classifying everybody. Was he more interested in his own soul, I wondered, or in the oppression of the working-man?
My astonishment was very great to discover that he rarely thought about his soul, and that he was not trying to reform anything.