Anne wondered whether Adeline knew Eliot. For Eliot talked to her about his work as he walked with her at a fine swinging pace over the open country, taking all his exercise now while he could get it. That was another thing he liked about Anne Severn, her splendid physical fitness; she could go stride for stride with him, and mile for mile, and never tire. Her mind, too, was robust and active, and full of curiosity; it listened by the hour and never tired. It could move, undismayed, among horrors. She could see, as he saw, the "beauty" of the long trains of research by which Sir Martin Crozier had tracked down the bacillus of amoebic dysentery and established the difference between typhoid and Malta fever.
Once started on his subject, the grave, sullen Eliot talked excitedly.
"You do see, Anne, how thrilling it is, don't you? For me there's nothing but bacteriology. I always meant to go in for it, and Sir Martin's magnificent. Absolutely top-hole. You see, all these disgusting diseases can be prevented. It's inconceivable that they should be tolerated in a civilized country. People can't care a rap or they couldn't sleep in their beds. They ought to get up and make a public row about it, to insist on compulsory inoculation for everybody whether they like it or not. It really isn't enough to cure people of diseases when they've got them. We ought to see that they never get them, that there aren't any to get… What we don't know yet is the complete behaviour of all these bacteria among themselves. A bad bacillus may be doing good work by holding down a worse one. It's conceivable that if we succeeded in exterminating all known diseases we might release an unknown one, supremely horrible, that would exterminate the race."
"Oh Eliot, how awful. How can you sleep in your bed?"
"You needn't worry. It's only a nightmare idea of mine."
And so on and so on, for he was still so young that he wanted Anne to be excited by the things that excited him. And Anne told him all about her Ilford farm and what she meant to do on it. Eliot didn't behave like Aunt Adeline, he listened beautifully, like Uncle Robert and Jerrold, as if it was really most important that you should have a farm and work on it.
"What I want is to sell it and get one here. I don't want to be anywhere else. I can't tell you how frightfully home-sick I am when I'm away. I keep on seeing those gables with the little stone balls, and the peacocks, and the fields down to the Manor Farm. And the hills, Eliot. When I'm away I'm always dreaming that I'm trying to get back to them and something stops me. Or I see them and they turn into something else. I shan't be happy till I can come back for good."
"You don't want to go to India?" Eliot's heart began to beat as he asked his question.
"I want to work. To work hard. To work till I'm so dead tired that I roll off to sleep the minute I get into bed. So tired that I can't dream."
"That isn't right. You're too young to feel like that, Anne."