“Heredity!” she said; and the ring of her voice matched the expression of her face.
“It’s rather an interesting subject,” continued Loring indolently. Scientific questions in their social aspects were just becoming fashionable. “It’s wonderful how long we have stopped short at the inheritance of Roman noses, and violent tempers, and plain facts of that kind without getting to anything more subtle.”
“Yes; I suppose it is,” answered Mrs. Romayne. There was a hard restraint in her voice, which Loring took for preoccupation and laid to the account of her expectation of Julian. She was sitting with her back to the light, and he could not see the expression of her face.
“It’s awfully consoling, don’t you know,” he went on in the same tone, “to feel that one can lay all one’s little failings to the account of some dead and gone ancestor, with a scientific mind. I don’t notice, by-the-bye, that even the greatest and most enthusiastic scientists show any tendency to refer their virtues and talents back. I presume they are always self-developed.”
Mrs. Romayne laughed, as she was obviously intended to do; but her laugh was rather harsh.
“Do you know, I think scientific men are a dreadful race!” she said. “They think that they know so much better than everybody else, and that what they know is so immensely important. As a rule, you know, it’s about something that they really can’t know anything about, and if they could, it would be a great deal better not to bother about it.”
She spoke with a confident, conclusive superiority, which is only possible, perhaps, in that section of society to which knowledge and brain-power are among the minor and entirely unimportant factors of life—except when the knowledge is knowledge of the world, and the brain-power that which has adapted itself to the requirements of society. But the superiority in her tone rang strained and false. She seemed to be forcing the attitude on herself even more than on Loring; and there was a faint ring of defiance in her voice—utterly inconsistent and incompatible with the words she spoke. The combination was curiously suggestive of that consuming fear which denies the very existence of that by which it is created.
Loring, however, was too fully occupied with a cynical appreciation of the humorous aspect of the wholesale condemnation of learning by crass ignorance to detect anything beneath the surface. An enigmatical smile touched his lips.
“There’s a great deal of penetration in what you say,” he said. “Of course, there would be! But I think you’re a little sweeping, perhaps, when you say that they don’t really know anything. Take heredity, for instance; it’s an actual fact, capable of demonstration, that——”
But Loring’s eloquence was broken short off. At that moment the door opened, and Julian Romayne came into the room.