“I starve for the sight of a true and simple face, for the grasp of a brotherly hand.”
“You?” exclaimed Hadria.
“There are so few, so very few, where the throng is thick and the battle fierce. It saddens me to see good fellows trampling one another down, growing hard and ungenerous. And then the vulgarity, the irreverence: they are almost identical, I think. One grows very sick and sorry at times amidst the cruelty and the baseness that threaten to destroy one’s courage and one’s hope. I know that human nature has in it a germ of nobility that will save it, in the long run, but meanwhile things seem sadly out of joint.”
“Is that the order of the universe?” asked Hadria.
“No, I think it is rather the disorder of man’s nature,” he replied.
Hadria asked if he would return to tea at the Red House. The Professor said he would like to call and see Hubert, but proposed a rest on the terrace, as it was still early in the afternoon.
“I used to avoid the place,” he said, “but I made a mistake. I have resolved to face the memories: it is better.”
It was the first time that he had ever referred, in Hadria’s presence, to the tragedy of the Priory.
“I have often wished to speak to you about my wife,” he said slowly, as they sat down on the old seat, on the terrace. “I have felt that you would understand the whole sad story, and I hoped that some day you would know it.” He paused and then added, “It has often been a comfort to me to remember that you were in the world, for it made me feel less lonely. I felt in you some new—what can I call it? instinct, impulse, inspiration, which ran you straight against all the hardest stone walls that intersect the pathways of this ridiculous old world. And, strange to say, it is the very element in you that sets you at loggerheads with others, that enabled me to understand you.”
Hadria looked bewildered.